Waiting for the Kick
by Lex Munro
Summary: Building up a friendship/partnership/romance is awkward when you keep important secrets and misunderstand each other on a fundamental level. Arthur/Eames. Warnings: slash, POV switches, OC, brief language, brief violence, movie spoilers.
1. Meeting

**warnings:** pre-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. language: g.

**pairing:** background Mal/Dom, a little Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** oh…five years before the movie.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) nerdy!Arthur is just a wonderful mental image. picture Brendan from Brick. that's right…now just hold onto that visual for a moment. i'll wait. done squeeing? okay. let's move on, then. 2) a certain designer-addict i live with insists that there's nothing quite as fabulous as a well-tailored Gucci three-piece suit. his favorite cost around $6K before alterations (and he wears it with $600 shirts). 3) i'm sure i'm not the first fan-author to give Arthur the surname Clarke. the writer (Arthur C. Clarke) was famous for very imaginative sci-fi (including 2001: A Space Odyssey). i'll bet that people who share names with celebrities get tired of comparisons (like Michael Bolton from Office Space). 4) Dom Pérignon is a famous high-end brand of champagne. 5) i'm far too amused by the idea of Arthur having something so normal in his life as a young nephew who names small pets after him. 6) the Glock (specifically the Glock 17) is a series of fairly common semi-auto pistols. the Glock is famous for being extremely reliable (the likelihood of jams or mechanical malfunctions is very low). 7) William Butler Yeats was a poet. he wrote about love (most poets do), but he also wrote about dreams, and one of his most famous poems involves both. 8) hastily added last-minute note: "drawing the chain" or "putting the chain on" is the act of using a chain lock on a door.

* * *

><p><strong>Meeting<strong>

Contrary to Eames' recollection, he and Arthur did _not_ meet on a job.

They actually met three weeks earlier, helping to move the Cobbs into a new house because Mal was pregnant.

Arthur was dressed casually—jeans, sweater, and glasses, every inch the nerdy bookworm—carrying a box stuffed to bursting with thesis papers, and probably blended into the background from Eames' perspective.

Eames, wearing a typically loud shirt, was lugging one end of a couch. He looked very rugged and manly, and utterly handsome.

"Oh!" Mal said, taking the box from Arthur. "Artie, dear, have you met Sean?"

"Hello," Arthur said.

"Cheers…" Eames grunted. "No, the other way—turn it the other way. Clockwise."

"What, my clockwise or your clockwise?" Cobb wheezed.

Arthur pointed. "Take the cushions off and lift the back end about a foot higher."

"Bit like my last date," Eames chortled breathlessly to himself.

And they did. And the couch fit. And they trudged their way into the living room without a backward glance, which Arthur considered par for the course where handsome men were concerned (he has much better luck with pretty girls, so it's a good thing he's bisexual).

"Is that everything?" Arthur asked Mal.

"Yes. Thank you so much."

He smiled and hugged her. "Have fun unpacking. I'll see you tomorrow."

The second time they met _was_ on a job, so Arthur was dressed professionally, polished up in a black Armani (one of the better suits he'd owned at the time, before he'd discovered the wonders of Gucci).

Dom gestured between them. "Arthur, you remember Sean Eames. He'll be our forger for this run. Eames, this is Arthur Clarke, our point man."

Sean Eames is, of course, _not_ Eames' real name. When he found out, Arthur felt very stupid and amateurish for having assumed it was (they were still working the mostly-legitimate side of extraction at the time, though, so it was a very nearly safe assumption to have made) and for not going by a pseudonym himself.

"Clarke, like the writer," noted Eames.

"Yes," Arthur replied, endlessly unamused by the tired comparison.

"I'm sure I would've remembered meeting _you_, darling," Eames said with a charming smile, and kissed Arthur's knuckles instead of shaking his hand. It figured the man would completely forget him and then try to be suave (that's just Arthur's luck with men, really).

Arthur arched an eyebrow. "I am not your darling, Mr. Eames, and despite certain uncharitable implications of the morality of our occupation, this is a _business_ and should be treated accordingly."

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, as they say," Eames purred with a wink. "I find business and pleasure mix rather well for a forger."

"Mixing business and pleasure gives rise to error, Mr. Eames," Arthur reproached. "During an extraction, the margin of error is the difference between abysmal failure and drinking Dom Pérignon in a thousand dollar suit."

"Only a thousand, sweetheart? We've got to introduce you to some more designer labels."

Gritting his teeth, Arthur finally extricated his hand from Eames' grip and marched back to his desk.

"He's a precious little perfectionist, isn't he?" Eames chuckled after him. "A fine quality in a point man."

Dom grunted an affirmative.

"I have three potential targets for you, Mr. Eames," Arthur said, ignoring the forger's comments. He held out three files. "The brother, the wife, and the assistant. Any one of them should set the client enough at his ease to find out what happened before and during the kidnapping."

Eames grinned and took the files. "Thanks _ever_ so much, love."

"Go do your job," Arthur said firmly.

After the extraction was finished and various team members went about their separate business (and Arthur was given to understand that Eames had gone off to gamble away his cut in Monte Carlo), Arthur's life settled back into neat regularity, exactly as he preferred it. Weekly call from his mother, biweekly call from Mal, letter from his nephew in crayon (they'd just gotten a new goldfish, and rather portentously named it Arthur), daily flirtation from the underage cashier at the convenience store on the corner…

Two months later, there was a knock at the door of his apartment.

People didn't knock on Arthur's door. Dom called ahead and met him elsewhere, Mal had a key (which she had forbidden Dom to use), and the landlord was the sort who left nasty little passive-aggressive notes if he needed something.

Arthur carefully marked his place in the book of poetry he'd been reading and set it down next to his coffee. Quite casually, he picked up the Glock that had also been waiting next to his coffee and held it behind his back as he went to answer the door.

Out in the hall, Eames started to say something about Monte Carlo, but broke off abruptly when he saw Arthur.

On a day off, in his own home, drinking coffee and reading Yeats, Arthur had naturally been wearing some comfortable flannels and an old tee-shirt. No suit, no contact lenses, no shined-up shoes or pomaded hair.

"How did you get this address, Mr. Eames?"

Eames looked quite shocked. "Artie!" he said accusingly.

"Only Mallorie calls me that," Arthur said with a clear threat in his tone. "What do you want, Mr. Eames?"

Somewhat flustered, the other man pointed down the hall, toward the elevator. "Cobb wondered—Mal's birthday—planning a surprise party, and…darling, have you always had this adorably rumpled side?"

"I am _not_ your darling, Mr. Eames, and I don't appreciate unexpected visitors. Tell Mr. Cobb to just use the phone next time. Is that all?"

After a moment, Eames slipped his hands into his pockets and grinned insolently. "Unless you fancy inviting me in, my dear."

Arthur closed the door sharply and locked it.

"Is that a 'no' or a 'let me slip into something less comfortable?'" Eames called through the door.

Upon further deliberation, Arthur drew the chain as well.

**.End.**


	2. Objections

**warnings:** pre-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. language: pg (for bint).

**pairing:** background Mal/Dom, some silly Eames/Arthur.

**timeline:** we'll call it about four years before the movie.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons for extraction. helping mental patients or trauma victims, for one. on the slightly shadier side, it could be used as an interrogation tool. and on the 'yeah, it's pretty much illegal' side of things, there's stealing corporate secrets or flushing out corporate spies. 2) "bint" is actually a slightly rude British word for a woman. it comes from the Arabic word for "daughter." 3) obviously, a forger isn't an absolute necessity on an extraction (they didn't have one for the first extraction of the movie), but i think that it would certainly make the job easier.

* * *

><p><strong>Objections<strong>

Arthur does not object to Dom and Mal inviting Eames along on extractions. An accomplished forger can be an enormous help, and Eames may well be the best there is. He has a quick and imaginative mind, and he's very good at putting subjects at their ease—to the extent that Arthur wonders how much _more_ helpful Eames might be if they were dabbling in the less legal side of dream-sharing.

No, Arthur does not object to Eames' presence during an extraction. It's during the days leading up to the extraction that he objects to Eames' presence.

Surely the man can do his own prep work _quietly_ and _far away from Arthur_.

Just at the moment, Eames is humming some vaguely familiar tune so off-key that it's impossible to tell exactly what song it should be.

"Shouldn't you be _working_?" Arthur asks archly, highlighting several lines in a bank transaction history.

Eames scoffs and puts his awful shoes (some kind of garish wingtips) up on the desk in front of him (which actually belongs to Mal). "That champagne bubble of a woman is nowhere _near_ as interesting as you, darling."

Arthur pauses in his research and stares fixedly at his pencil cup. "I'm not the one you'll be impersonating," he points out as he goes back to the piece of paper and highlights another line. "And kindly get your filthy feet off Mal's desk."

The ugly shoes make a muted scuffing noise as they return to the floor. "Arthur, dear, are you really all work and no play?"

"When I'm working, yes," Arthur says blandly. "And I am neither your darling nor your dear, Mr. Eames."

"Oh, aren't you?" Eames laughs.

Arthur's left eyebrow twitches in annoyance. He just knows that if he tries to argue, they'll be bickering all day. "Mr. Eames, whether the subject's wife is utterly fascinating or dull as a wooden spoon, it's your job to convince the subject that you are, in fact, she. If there's even a single flaw in your performance, you'll be spotted, the extraction will fail and we'll all gain a reputation as frauds, we'll never be able to find work again and sweet little Phillipa will starve and it will be _your fault_."

"Hmph," pouts Eames, spinning in Mal's chair. "You exaggerate far more than is quite healthy. Fortunately, it's very fetching on you. Fine, fine. Spoilsport. In the spirit of noble self-sacrifice, I shall go watch that moronic bint squander her husband's money, the better to know whether he's really been dealing under the table."

"Good."

Eames gets up and straightens his shirt (some hideous beige-and-maple polo that Arthur would like to take and burn) and saunters over to Arthur. "Don't miss me too terribly, darling," he says, and kisses Arthur's cheek.

Arthur clenches his hands, crumpling the bank history slightly at the edges, but manages not to spin and break Eames' smug nose. After the extraction, he thinks. After the extraction, he'll shut the man up with a solid punch and go on with life.

He ignores the fact that he's thought the same thing during the last three extractions with Eames and has yet to punch the bastard.

He ignores the fact that before each extraction Dom has asked him, quite seriously, whether he has any objections to using Eames as their forger.

He ignores the fact that when Dom asks him this, he always replies with a brusque, _Of course not, Mr. Eames is the best forger in the business_.

And he _certainly_ ignores the fact that Mal just smiles a secretive little smile when he says that.

**.End.**


	3. Tak

Tak, with a little more insight than i originally wrote in, the better to keep her from seeming like a horrible Mary Sue butting her way into the story.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. OC: Tak Shibuya (i swear she's not a Mary Sue). language: g.

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** several months post-movie.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) apparently, Mal's mother's official name is "Marie." 2) some people can just politely ignore awful mispronunciation. some people foam at the mouth. 3) a Grand Lux is a fairly nice suite at the L'Ermitage Beverly Hills, a five-star, five-diamond hotel. very nice for a weekend getaway. 4) the best cons don't do it for the money. they do it for the thrills, and because they can.

**p.s.** i'm totally okay with you hating Tak at the moment. she's definitely giving me a hell of a time as a muse/character…she keeps trying to be mysterious and i'm like "no, i have to explain more about you, or people will want to stake you through the chest."

* * *

><p><strong>Tak<strong>

"I want you to meet my babysitter," Dom had said, quite seriously.

"What?" Arthur had replied, nonplussed. First, he had no idea why Dom would give up precious time with the children he'd only just gotten back. Second, he had no idea why Dom would want Arthur to meet his _babysitter_, of all people. "What babysitter? What about Marie?"

"To be honest, I got a little tired of the accusatory glances."

Arthur could understand that. Mal's mother still isn't completely convinced that Dom didn't push his wife out a window. "Hm. But what's so important about a babysitter?"

"Trust me."

So here they are, Arthur and this strange girl, sitting together at Dom's kitchen table while Dom and his kids build a cardboard fort in the yard (assorted moving boxes, all shapes and sizes).

She was introduced to him as Tak Shibuya, but he doesn't quite believe that's her real name.

Tak is petite and carelessly dressed (frumpy clothes, slip-on shoes, messy ponytail). She doesn't make eye contact with him, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that she must be at least half Japanese.

"Have you known Mr. Cobb long?" she asks. Her accent is very American, something flavorless and urban that may be a complete affectation (he's heard Eames fake exactly the same nondescript accent).

"Yes," Arthur replies.

"Okay," she says, after it becomes clear he isn't going to say more.

He watches her. She watches a spot near his cheek—not his eyes, never his eyes. That's interesting. "So, Miss Shibuya…"

She flinches at the pronunciation (he hears her mutter the name properly, _shee_-boo-yah).

Arthur carefully makes no sign of having heard her. "…that's a Japanese name, isn't it?"

"Mm."

"What do you do? Aside from babysitting, that is."

She shrugs a little. "I'm an artist."

Ah, that's more like it. "Architecture?" he asks.

She shakes her head. "I'm okay at building things, but lousy with technical drawings. I mean…I couldn't draw a city to save my life, but the kids and I built a pretty awesome one last week with blocks."

"That's all right," he tells her. "Sometimes being able to build is more useful. Do you draw?"

"I'm a sculptor, mostly. So-so with animals. Better with people. I do a lot of surrealism, but it doesn't sell well."

"And where do you get your inspiration?"

She shrugs again. "Books. Games. Movies. Dreams."

Ah.

"Dreams," he echoes.

"Mm-hm. I'm a lucid dreamer. My brain comes up with some weird stuff, and then I do whatever I want and see what comes of it…and if it's any good, I sketch it the next day and see if I can sculpt it."

_Very_ interesting. "Have you heard of dream-sharing?" he asks her.

"Oh, sure, my uncle—" She breaks off abruptly, pretty half-Asian eyes wide with something like worry.

Arthur keeps his tone light when he says, "What about your uncle?"

"Just…y'know, he mentioned…" She looks away from his face altogether, staring out into the yard. Phillipa giggles. Tak blinks. "My uncle introduced me to Mr. Cobb. Said Mr. Cobb had done some work for him in the past and might have some use for my…talents."

James and Phillipa scamper into the kitchen, digging for plastic cups and getting a jug of juice out of the fridge.

"Hold it still," Phillipa tells her brother as she uncaps the juice and begins to pour.

Dom stands between Tak and Arthur with his hands in his pockets. "Have you told him, Tak?"

Her dark eyes dart up, then away, and she shakes her head.

"It's all right, Arthur's an old friend. We work together."

All at once, Tak looks straight into Arthur's eyes. There's something oddly piercing about her gaze. She clears her throat. "All right, then. Tak Shibuya is not the name I was born with. I've had several others, and they don't really matter. My uncle is a very rich and powerful man, and he purchased Mr. Cobb's services several months ago."

Arthur blinks. "Saito," he says.

"_Saito_," she mutters, correcting his pronunciation again (_sigh_-toe). Careful vowels and a crisp T, picking out the O in a way he's only heard fluent speakers do. "My uncle seems to think my artistic ability, along with certain other 'talents' I have, will make me uniquely capable in dream-sharing. Quite frankly, he hopes it'll keep me out of…'further embarrassing legal misadventures.'"

"So I thought you could plug her in and give her some training," Dom says blithely. "See if Saito's right."

As if someone like Saito could possibly be wrong.

Tak flinches when Dom says the name—the T is wrong, flicked carelessly.

"Yusuf's been flown in to find the best mix for her," Dom goes on. "And…see if you can track down Eames and Ariadne."

"Okay," Arthur replies. He pulls a small notebook out of the pocket of his blazer and writes down the address of the hotel where he's staying, tears out the page and slides it over to Tak. "Tomorrow. Two o'clock."

She raises an eyebrow when she reads the note. "You, Mr. Clarke, are a _snob_."

"I enjoy the finer things in life." "Five hundred a night is a little beyond 'finer things in life.'"

He looks at her, but she doesn't give an inch. "I have a minor weakness for five-star hotels," he admits.

She grins. "There's nothing quite like a Grand Lux if you plan to stay a while."

When he gets back to his hotel suite, Arthur immediately starts researching Tak. He finds a dozen aliases, in Japanese and English and halfway in-between. 'Further embarrassing legal misadventures,' indeed: several of those aliases have been arrested for fraud and confidence schemes, several more implicated but never charged (or never found). She's the daughter of Saito's deceased younger sister, older than she looks, but much younger than she pretends to be. Piecemeal formal education, with indications that she is smart but poorly motivated.

It's like a thousand other stories of a thousand other professional liars (himself included). Arthur absently wonders if even Eames' story is like that. 'In and out of trouble with the law,' and 'piecemeal education,' and 'smart but poorly motivated.'

Provided they can find the appropriate motivation, a con-man (con-woman, in this case) who can build will make an excellent extractor.

**.End.**


	4. Mixture

some Tak 'n Arthur, and Arthur's irrational dislike of forgers.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary Sue). language: pg-13 (for f*** and s***).

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the day after **Tak**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) i think someone who has chronic insomnia would have problems with a 'standard' somnacin mixture, hence Yusuf's duty of figuring out how heavily Tak needs to be sedated. 2) tempera is a kind of paint. 3) as i recall, 80 fahrenheit (about 27ish C) is actually on the cool end for Mombasa. they average closer to 28C (something like 85F), and get up to 32+C (90F).

* * *

><p><strong>Mixture<strong>

Yusuf's fingers make little tinkling noises as he pokes through his case.

The look on Tak's face is something between skeptical and amused.

Arthur takes the opportunity to watch her—gauge her reactions, get a handle on her.

"Any allergies?" asks Yusuf. The tinkling noises pause as he slips a few tiny glass vials from the case (Tak's eyes lock on the colored liquids before following stained brown fingers back to the case). "Any daily medications, prescription or otherwise?"

"No and sleep aids," Tak says. After a moment, she leans forward to peer into Yusuf's case.

Yusuf makes a noise of disapproval and draws out another vial to look at its label. "How strong?"

"Over-the-counter."

"Right, let's try this on for starters." Yusuf picks up a tiny, slender syringe and fills it in odd proportions from the vials he's taken from the case, wiping the needle after each one to keep his chemicals pure.

Arthur hooks up to the PASIV—Tak looks away and flinches when Yusuf slips the second lead into her wrist (doesn't like needles, that's interesting).

He stands alone in the dream for a long time. After thirty minutes, he comes back up.

"That's no good," says Yusuf. He takes up another little syringe, fills it again in a way that looks, to Arthur's untrained eye, like the same proportions as before. Again, he wipes the needle between vials, as though keeping paint pigments separate.

Abruptly, Arthur realizes that dream-chemistry, unlike most kinds of chemistry, is not a science—it's an art. It isn't a matter of precision, it's a matter of quick and intuitive guesswork, of adjustments after-the-fact. The realization is isolating. Arthur is a technician, not an artist, and there is something very lonely about being a machine among animals. He hasn't felt lonely since he was nearly five, new backpack on his shoulders while his mother tearfully kissed his cheek and shooed him off to his first day of kindergarten.

How strange.

It's a drawn-out process, finding a mixture that works for Tak. Despite her size, she's difficult to put under and difficult to keep under (which is interesting, watching her flicker in and out of a dream in mid-sentence). If she's going to be a dreamer, she'll need to be dosed to get any kind of stability.

It takes four attempts. Four mixes, like trying to pick out the perfect color for a room.

When they finally get her asleep for the full five minutes, she builds a city like Arthur's never seen. It's some kind of twenty-fourth-century affair, bits of Blade Runner and Fifth Element and Star Wars. She manages several changes before Arthur's sub cons even start to look interested. He ends the dream before they turn actively hostile.

Tak has a mile-wide grin when they wake up.

"That's more like it," Yusuf declares happily. "Tough little customer. Interruptive, circadian arrhythmic…"

"You've settled on a mixture?" Arthur asks impatiently.

"Good enough to go on with. Have to see how it goes with more than just the two of you."

Arthur nods. "Give us another five minutes, then, and we'll get to work on some proper instruction."

The next dream is simple—a suburban area overlooking the ocean. It looks like somewhere in Japan, and very nearly deserted…the occasional hunched old lady tending a shop or skinny old man bicycling past them.

"Is this real?" he asks with a frown.

"Most of it."

"That's no good."

She looks at him. "Because I won't be able to tell it's a dream? Please. I always know when I'm dreaming."

Over-confident.

His frown deepens. "Arrogance is a weakness, Miss Shibuya."

"Tak," she says. "For God's sake, _Tak_. Your pronunciation kills me, Mr. Clarke."

He raises his eyebrows. "Call me Arthur."

"Fair enough."

"Everyone eventually gets lost in a dream, Tak," he tells her. "Even the best of us. That's why we use totems."

"Totems?"

"Some small, unique object that would behave differently in dreams, or that a stranger wouldn't be able to fake. Something you could carry with you at all times, possibly hidden."

"A locket you never open, a ring with engraving on the inside," she guesses. "Maybe a hand-made keychain or a loaded die? And you'd have to make sure no one else knew the trick of it."

Exactly.

Even though she's looking away, he nods. "If your totem is ever compromised, or if you suspect it may have been compromised, you should replace it immediately."

She speeds up to outpace him a bit and turns around to walk backward in front of him. "Why not carry more than one?"

"Needlessly complicated," he replies. "If you have more than one, that's more things to force yourself to remember when you're getting lost."

After a moment she nods her understanding. "So anyone can get lost. But that means we could use dreams of real places to make it harder for a mark to tell he's dreaming. All we have to do is make sure we check our totems."

He narrows his eyes at her. "A valid point. But if you build a place that you have memories of, you could bring in projections from those memories, and that could compromise us."

Tak pauses at the side of the road, stretches a hand up, starts doodling with the clouds. "Okay. So. Places we've seen in photographs, places we've only been in passing, places we've seen in movies, like I did earlier."

Yes. In fact, he's been planning to have her reconstruct things from photographs (carefully, a room or a building at a time). "The danger exists for every person on the extraction team; and while you may know immediately that you're dreaming, someone else may not."

As she moves her finger, the clouds over the ocean puff and smear like tempera.

Arthur's left eyebrow twitches. "Please pay attention."

"I _am_ paying attention. Duck."

"Wh—" A soccer ball hits him in the back of the head.

Three young boys cackle and jeer.

Arthur runs a hand over his hair, tugs his jacket straight, kicks the ball back to the little brats.

"Mm-hm," says Tak, still doodling. "So, what were you going to teach me before you decided to lecture me about dreaming real places?"

"You've seen the kind of things you can change without drawing too much attention. The layout of a city. The layout of a building. In unobtrusive places like stairwells, elevators, alleys. There are some things that will piss off even an untrained subconscious in a heartbeat."

"Fun shit like flying, right?" she sighs. "Playing with physics, changing the rules. Things that would make real people sit up and go 'what the fuck'…"

Aptly put. He nods again. "But you can get away with a little more if the subject is distracted. Not too much, mind…but a little. Sometimes, that's plenty. It's important to keep control of your own thoughts, too, to keep from accidentally changing things—graffiti, posters, radio, television."

Tak puts the finishing stroke on a prowling housecat, its tail a wisp of windblown cirrus extending from a crouched bank of stratocumulus. "What about people?"

Arthur isn't sure what she means. "What, change one projection into another?"

She shrugs. "Or yourself. If you can do something like tie a staircase in a knot, can't you do something simple like change your clothes? Or your hair? Or…everything?"

"Yes and no," he answers cautiously. "It's possible in theory, but the average person isn't observant enough to convincingly mimic another person, and many of the ones who are can't consciously let go of a lifetime of self-identity."

Slowly, she turns. And then she isn't Tak anymore. Arthur's looking at a copy of himself, except that it's wearing a shit-eating grin.

He's never seen someone forge on the second successful dream-sharing session. The fact that she seems to know this is grating (his left eyebrow twitches again).

"As I said, the average person," he concedes. "It's not just looks, Tak. If your mannerisms are too far off, it's the same as anything else the subconscious determines to be out-of-place."

Tak schools her borrowed features into a stern frown. "Of course," she says in his voice.

He snorts. "And you'll have to do better than just the face and voice to fool someone who actually _knows_ me."

"Give me a few more days."

Again, over-confident. Annoying. He files away the arrogance as typical of forgers. God, he hates dealing with forgers…their arrogance, their artistic temperament, their eccentricity, their _imprecision_. His fingers go cold as that odd, isolated loneliness hits him again.

_Machine among animals._

He takes a calming breath. "Changing your features to imitate someone else—real or imagined—is called forging, and it has its own dangers. First and foremost, of course, is discovery. The average subconscious reacts very badly to a person literally changing identities. If your control slips, if you're caught next to the person you've forged, if the subject determines you're a fake in any way, the sub cons will be on you in seconds. The other principle danger is the same as building from memory. Forge too well, and you may come to believe you're the person you've forged."

She looks out at the ocean. "Can _you_ forge?"

Because her back is turned, he allows a wince. "Not well. I can put on a convincing con, but only as myself. I'm the wrong kind of liar to be a forger."

"What about Mr. Cobb?"

"I told you, the average—"

"But you're not average, are you?" she says. "You and Mr. Cobb led a team on an impossible mission and _succeeded_."

"Mostly because of the quick thinking of our forger," Arthur grudgingly admits.

He refuses to mention the fact that they should've had months to work a long con, that Eames had only needed to think quickly because Arthur's research had been imperfect (Arthur still doesn't know who trained Fischer, but he _will_, and then he'll beat the _crap_ out of whoever-it-is).

"So it's hard, forging?" Tak glances over her shoulder, face set in a speculative expression Arthur has seen himself make in photographs.

He shrugs. "It's like painting. Some people can do it decently, some people can't do it at all."

"And some people can do it very, very well."

"And like painting," he goes on, "you'll need training and practice to get good at it."

She shifts back to her own shape. "Since you suck at it, I guess I'll wait for that kind of training."

He narrows his gaze at her and tells himself that hitting her won't solve anything.

"Tell me what else I can do with a PASIV machine, Arthur. It was designed to explore the subconscious, right? So…clearly, it could be used for something like psychotherapy. I could talk to a projection of Mr. Cobb and see exactly how you think of him, exactly the reactions you expect of him…"

She catches on quickly. _Very_ quickly.

"Yes," Arthur confirms.

"And if I were the subject, you could talk to my projection of my uncle to see how I feel about him. The exaggerations would be quite telling, I'm sure. Hm. And if a stray projection appeared, we could tell whose it was by the way it acted. My version of Mr. Cobb would probably be cheerful, absent-minded…with fuzzy pink hair-ties in his pockets and finger-paint stains on his shirt…flinching every time he heard a woman speak French."

Arthur shrugs.

"You could use it to help coma patients, couldn't you," she says, and it doesn't sound like a question.

"But there wouldn't be much money in it," Arthur replies.

Tak twirls a step, like a little girl, and now she's wearing a Japanese high school uniform. Pleated blue skirt, crisp sailor collar. "Ooh, the practical approach. A neat way to avoid having to talk about your opinion."

Perceptive. _Persistent_.

He arches an eyebrow. "I don't see that my opinion matters. I have a profession, I'm good at it, and it pays well enough to dress me in the clothes I like and board me at the hotels I enjoy. I get a sense of accomplishment from it, the jobs that pay well do so because the people involved on either side are extremely wealthy and often rather amoral, and I give a healthy percentage of that pay to charities. I have no compulsion to be any more directly altruistic."

She moves her mouth silently, repeating his words to herself (_more directly altruistic_), almost as if she's testing the flavor of them, or practicing the cadence of his speech. "Could you use a PASIV for something more mundane?" she asks. "Just to speed up normal processes? Contemplation, philosophy, problem solving, memory training, _lessons_…"

"Yes, provided you have or can get a good supply of the chemicals. The time-compressive aspect of dream-sharing was the use which interested the United States Government, but one of the original purposes of PASIV technology was intellectual organization." He's ready when the boys kick their soccer ball too far again, leans back just enough to dodge (they complain and chase after it). "That'll be a good exercise in control for you. Sit down for a few sessions and work on consciously putting your thoughts into some media so that you can move them around, organize them, put some away…"

Tak reaches into her shirt and pulls out a key on a chain. She goes to the nearest house, unlocks and opens the front door.

Inside, the house becomes a cozy study, dimensions all wrong for the outside. The girl really is learning fast.

She grabs a book from an overstuffed shelf and opens it, fanning the pages with her thumb (the stuttering noise of paper hitting paper is loud in the snug room). Papers fly free, notes and cards and tidbits, filling the air with the smell of old newsprint.

The fact that she put her thoughts on paper is interesting. She could've put sound bites on the radio, video clips on the television, any number of things on a laptop. So she likes hardcopy, handwriting. She probably writes things down in the waking world, too—maybe even on colored sticky notes like these.

Somewhere in the distance, in some nearby room, a music box tinkles out a plaintive little tune.

Arthur watches her sit down on the floor and start shuffling things. The writing varies, but he thinks it's all hers, in pencil and marker and colored pens.

Whatever she's doing, she seems enthralled by it, so Arthur leaves her to it. He takes a seat in a leather wingback and tries to plan out a training schedule for her.

Two or three sessions a day, max, to make sure she doesn't suffer any side-effects from the drugs. Perhaps play with building more semi-familiar locations. Get her used to building from someone else's blueprints, get her used to learning someone else's dream. He and Cobb have been tossing around the idea of a cooperative variety of architecture, of multiple dreams that mimic one another or fit together; maybe she and Ariadne could learn to make it work.

And he'll have to track down Eames; he doesn't have the first clue how to teach someone to forge. Finding Ariadne will be easy (she went right back to university after the Fischer job), but finding Eames after a job is always a headache…he hides too well (though Arthur hates to admit it), almost jealously protective of his Eames identity, even though it's just another false name. Maybe it's been long enough that Eames has stopped bothering to hide. Maybe he's home in Mombasa, wearing ugly shirts ('This is what Kenya finds fashionable these days, darling.') and sipping hot tea in eighty-degree-heat.

Arthur would be a lousy point man if he banked on that chance. He loses track of time, mentally listing out all the contacts to try, all the paper trails to sniff out.

They wake without incident when the timer goes off.

Tak blinks at the hotel suite, and at Yusuf when he leans in to look at her face and check her vitals.

"Enough for today, I think," Yusuf says. "Let's wait and see if you suffer any ill effects. If you do, we can make some more adjustments tomorrow."

She nods slowly, as though she's having trouble shaking the dream.

Arthur unhooks from the machine and opens the briefcase waiting by his chair. He takes out a handful of postcards and sets them down. "Study those, Miss Tak, and find yourself a totem. Tomorrow, you'll be building a passable simulacrum of Grand Central Station. Same time."

She gives him a long, penetrating look that reminds him uncomfortably of the way Saito looked at them from the erroneous carpet in Nash's dream. It's a look that says 'is that the best you've got?' and 'I've got you now,' and 'you've really underestimated me.' Then she gathers up the postcards and tucks them into her bookbag. "Enjoy the rest of your day, Arthur."

**.End.**


	5. The Student

this was actually the first place where i wrote Tak (i've mentioned that i write out-of-order). Tak appeared in this fic without apology or preamble, and i had to sit her down and ask her who the hell she was and why she thought she deserved to be an OC who wasn't a Red Shirt.

**warnings:** post-movie with flashback to pre-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. OC: Tak Shibuya, whom i'm still somewhat in the process of beating all traces of Mary-Sue-ism out of. language: g.

**pairing:** background Mal/Dom, traces of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** the flashback is to Mal's first pregnancy, some six years or so before the movie, the present-tense stuff is set several months post-movie.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) Sean as Eames' given name was pretty much just me drawing a name out of a hat, since i don't believe for a minute that Eames is his real name anyway. just a common given name paired with a common surname, kind of on the order of Jim Brown for Americans. 2) Tak is an original female character. she's Saito's niece, and has been handed over to Cobb and the gang to train in dream-sharing. her biggest flaw (other than the fact that she's basically the impersonation equivalent of a compulsive liar) is that she reads people well enough to guess their secrets, so they tend to find her unlikeable.

* * *

><p><strong>The Student<strong>

"How exactly do you know Mr. Eames?"

It had been a matter of simple curiosity.

The man didn't seem like the sort who moved in the right circles to meet Dom and Mal. In fact, he seemed like a scoundrel, a brigand. A shameless trickster thief.

"Sean?" Mal said with an impish smile. "He was one of my father's students, too. Just like Dom."

Arthur frowned.

She laughed at him. "You don't believe me?"

"I can't picture Mr. Eames as a student of Architecture."

"Oh, he's not—he wasn't." The loose dark curls of her hair bounced as she shook her head. "He was an art history student. Architecture just happens to be part of art history."

"Art history," he echoed skeptically.

She laughed again. "Yes! And quite gifted at it. He knows all the classical painters, all their best imitators, the great sculptors, the Renaissance architects… My father suggested he might do well as a restorer, or an authenticator. It takes a well-trained eye to be able to tell a forgery from the real thing, after all."

Disapprovingly, Arthur grunted to himself. "And instead he became a forger himself. I doubt your father would approve."

"Oh, don't be like that, Artie," Mal chided, touching his forearm. "It's for a good cause. When Sean pretends to be somebody else in a dream, it helps the subject feel more at ease. We can't pull out their traumas, help them regain precious memories, things like that, if they don't feel safe."

She was right, of course. Eames is a liar and a thief, but he is an absolute expert at soothing a traumatized subject.

"He's not such a bad sort. Here—look." She went over to the shelf and pulled down a university yearbook.

Arthur remembers the exact sound the spine made when it creaked open. His eyes skimmed the heading of the page she'd opened, automatically translated from the French: the Art History Club. There were seven people there—a skinny man with square-framed glasses, a pair of twin girls with cheerful round cheeks, a small man with a distinctly Moroccan look to him, Dom, Mal, and Eames.

He remembers the way he blinked, taken aback, and tilted his head.

There was Eames, clean-shaven and handsome and unsmiling.

"He doesn't, you know," Mal said conspiratorially, and leaned close over the book. "Doesn't smile for pictures."

Arthur glanced at her, then back to the book as she turned to a different page. Eames and four other students were receiving some kind of academic commendation. Again, no smile.

The pages turned. Eames with the Classical Sculpture Club. Eames on an outing with the Renaissance Masters Class. Eames listening intently to a lecture.

No smiles.

How odd.

Mal grinned. "It's almost like a game, trying to get a picture of him smiling. I've never yet succeeded, and I don't know of anyone who has. I even have pictures of _you_ smiling, but none at all of Sean. He's far too quick and clever. The very instant you have your camera ready, it's gone, like a flash of lightning."

And he remembers the way her words made his heart skip.

Her grin faded slowly and she leaned back to rub a hand over the heavy roundness of her belly. "My mother once said that a man who guards his smile so well must have had his heart broken too many times."

It was there on the page, staring up at them from clever eyes under aristocratic brows…a wounded sort of wariness. How young he looked. How sad. How far-away.

Now, in a shared dream, Arthur hurriedly snaps the book closed and shoves it onto a shelf before Tak can notice that the only pictures in it are of Eames' unsmiling face.

God, the last thing he needs is to give that smart little yakuza girl more of his secrets. She doesn't even know Eames, but she'll have to if she's going to learn to forge properly.

"You okay?" she asks, still sorting little pieces of paper to organize her thoughts.

"Of course," he declares. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Mm," she replies, in a tone that suggests she's heard the exact words before from a man with a missing limb.

Arthur nudges the spine of the book again in a fitful attempt to press it flush with the others.

**.End.**


	6. Frazzled

ladies 'n gents, i give you "Arthur having a bad day." because Tak is a smartass, and that's funny.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary Sue). language: pg-13 (for f***).

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; 4 days after **Mixture**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) we all know Eames would use really bad txtish and Internettish purely to piss Arthur off. 2) "gtg" = "got to go" 3) i challenge you to find a Joss Whedon project that didn't somehow involve a fairly small woman having leet ninja skills. 4) the M60 is a beautiful beast of a machine gun. it's incredibly unreliable under extended heavy use, quite heavy, and slow to reload (since it's belt-fed), but it's got such a distinctive sound (and fires such large bullets) that it's still the darling of many military game and military literature enthusiasts. probably the best-known use of the M60 is as a side-mount weapon on choppers.

* * *

><p><strong>Frazzled<strong>

Five days after first meeting Tak Shibuya, Arthur is scowling at his cell phone. He has spent the last three days playing phone-tag with unsavory characters all over the globe, only to finally get his first useful reply seconds after texting the only number he has ever had for Eames.

_cant bsy_

He wants to reply with something unkind. He wants to say _Sorry, Eames, my Idiot to English translator is broken. What the hell did you just say?_ Unfortunately, his Idiot to English translator is still in working order, so it would be a vicious lie. Eames means _I can't make it to LA just now; I'm busy._ Arthur wishes to God the infuriating bastard would take the extra button-presses to say that.

Irrationally peeved, he stabs at the messenger keyboard on his phone.

_Kindly learn to type._

Several seconds later, he has a new message.

_not typng txtng_

Arthur has to stand and pace for a moment to keep from throwing his cell phone at something. He quashes the desire to snap back something about learning to use the shift key and punctuation. If he does, he'll be playing Eames' game. He'll be getting himself into yet another bickering match (their acquaintance seems to be made of little else, aside from flirting and unresolved tension and the unspoken lingering sentiment of _God, if I see you outside work I'll either kill you or kiss you_). He doesn't have time for a bickering match with Eames, not when Tak is due to arrive any minute now.

_How soon can you be here?_

Fortunately, Eames' lack of texting acuity has thoroughly hobbled his ability to make innuendoes. Nearly a minute later (was Eames debating whether to make a sad attempt at innuendo anyway?) he gets the answer.

_tues_

Well, at least he has three more days to drill some good habits into Tak before Eames comes to ruin it all.

_gtg darling _

Of course Eames will take the time to completely spell out the one word he knows makes Arthur want to hit him.

The clock on his phone ticks over, and he hears the computerized hum of the door's card reader (just in time to stop him from giving in and throwing his phone across the room). Tak showed up on the second day with a card, and has never explained where she got it from…then again, Arthur hasn't asked.

He flips his phone closed. "We're waiting on Yusuf," he says.

Tak comes in and kicks her bag under a chair. "I thought the mixture was good."

"It is," he tells her, unfastening his cuff and slipping his cufflink into his pocket (it's a comforting counterweight, his totem in the left and his cufflink in the right). He rolls up his sleeve and continues. "But it isn't strictly safe to do today's lesson without someone monitoring us."

"Sounds fun," she says blandly. "Who were you texting, that got you so riled up?"

Arthur looks up sharply, but Tak is scribbling something in a tiny notebook. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean," he says.

She makes a single wry clicking noise with her tongue, eyebrows raised, and keeps writing. "You had your phone out and were using it. I heard a chime, but no talking. You clearly went from sitting to standing in an impatient hurry, because your waistcoat—sorry, Americans call them vests—is sitting high on your shirt. Whoever you were texting annoyed you enough that you got up without fixing your vest…and probably paced a bit, knowing you."

"I could have just been checking my messages, or suddenly remembered something," he points out, tugging his waistcoat into place without mentioning that he has his suits tailored (or made, when he feels like splurging) by men who use the term 'waistcoat.'

"Buuut," she says, finishing a sentence and flipping the little notebook shut before she looks at him. "You weren't, and you didn't. You were having a text message conversation with someone who tried your patience, you got up and paced, the conversation concluded, I arrived, and you hung up your phone. I say concluded because there hasn't been another chime to indicate a new text message."

And she looks so obnoxiously pleased with herself for such wild guessing.

Arthur decides that he hates forgers, _all_ forgers, for that stupid Sherlock Holmes haughtiness. His left eyebrow twitches.

His cell phone chirps. A text from Yusuf.

_Heading up, don't shoot._

Yusuf can type properly when texting. Ariadne can. Cobb can. So why the hell can't Eames?

Five minutes are sacrificed to letting Yusuf in and allowing Yusuf and Tak to work through the social dance of 'good to see you' and 'how have you been' (and Arthur really, _really_ hates the fact that Yusuf seems to like Tak so much, as if Arthur's general annoyance with her is some malfunction on _his_ part).

Then they're in Arthur's dream, on a dirt training ground in nondescript fatigues.

"Sometimes you won't have the option of retreating when the subject's subconscious gets aggressive," he tells her while she looks around. "Under sedation, you have to fight it out long enough to ride the kick. You'll need some basic training with firearms and hand-to-hand combat."

The look on her face is completely unreadable. Blank. Perhaps thoughtful.

Arthur whistles, and a trio of nearby projections approach. "Gentlemen, give the little lady a quick lesson in self-defense."

"Okay," one of them says in the slow, placating tone of someone instructing a terrified amateur. "I'm gonna come at you, and I want you to—"

Whatever the projection wanted Tak to do is lost when she grabs his hand, turns it sharply, and kicks him in the back of the head.

The other two projections move. Tak dislocates the shoulder of the first one to take a swing, and kicks the knee out from under the other (there's a nasty snapping noise, and he goes down with a howl).

The three projections writhe and groan in the dirt.

Arthur feels his left eyebrow twitch again and smoothes a finger over it. "Where did you learn to do that?" he asks.

Tak blinks at him in perfect innocence, as if it's an everyday occurrence for a ninety-pound girl to disable three grown men (and it's really _not_, outside of Joss Whedon projects). "I forget." She shrugs it off. "I had a lot of martial arts training when I was young. Should I have mentioned that? _I know kung fu_," she says in a theatrically deep voice.

He should have expected it. Saito isn't the sort of man who would let female relatives go defenseless. Saito is the sort of man who would foster any sense of self-sufficiency, _especially_ in a girl.

Tak raises an eyebrow expectantly. "Keanu Reeves, The Matrix? You _do_ watch movies, don't you? Sometimes?"

Frazzled.

That's the word for how he feels today. Unprepared and off-kilter and flung about carelessly. And it's all the fault of forgers. Damned all-knowing, mysterious, 'I didn't tell you because you didn't ask, teehee' _forgers_.

"How about Star Wars? _Judge me by my size, do you_? Nothing? Really?"

Arthur reminds himself very sternly that hitting her will not solve anything. In fact, it may end up hurting _him_ quite a lot. Yelling that _of course he's seen Star Wars, he hasn't been living in a fucking _cave_ for the past half-century_ won't solve anything, either.

Instead, he cups his hands around his mouth and turns toward the closest building. "Medic!" he calls.

Dutifully, more projections jog out and fetch the three Tak mangled, putting them on stretchers and carting them off.

Arthur draws a cleansing breath. "So," he says. "Do you know how to fire a handgun?"

"Yep."

"Rifle?"

"Mm-hm."

"Light machine gun?" he says in jest.

"No, but I've always wanted to."

"Okay," Arthur says with vengeful cheer. "Let's introduce you to a classic, then—the M60."

And if Arthur is very nearly grinning when Tak wakes up nursing an imaginary recoil bruise the size of a soda can…well, he's had a very trying day, after all.

"Now, let's talk about combative creation and dream stability."

**.End.**


	7. Rude Surprise

this time, from Tak's POV. she's a helpfully observant little thing, almost as revealing as a 3rd Person Omniscient, but with the fun of a personality. sort of.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue, god no, and she's not likely to get any of the guys). language: g.

**pairing:** a little bit of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; Arthur has been training Tak in dream-sharing for a week or so.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) i rarely use the trick of looking at a pairing through an outside observer; it just feels like a cheap shortcut most of the time. but as i said, Tak just wandered into my fics uninvited (and rather unrepentant) and made herself at home. i'm doing my best to keep her from turning bland, because if she did i might as well just cut her right out and go for 3PO. 2) anyone shorter than about 5'4" won't fit the average chair. they have to either sit on the edge or pull their legs up onto the chair with them, and a chair with a high, cushioned back (or a head-rest) will still fit wrong even then. my husband's little sister (5'2") and MerianMoriarty (4'11") both get neck-cricks from car seats and high-backed chairs within 5 minutes of leaning back. 3) i imagine that cons don't appreciate the presence of other cons; it's harder to get away with things around someone who knows the same tricks.

* * *

><p><strong>Rude Surprise<strong>

"You look indecisive about something," Tak notes when she opens the door of the hotel suite.

"I can't decide whether you and Eames should be a surprise to one another," Arthur replies as she walks forward and kicks her bag under her favorite chair.

She shrugs. "I don't think it would give me any particular advantage."

He raises his eyebrows. "Hm. Actually, I was thinking it might work the other way around. Eames is…a rude surprise, to put it mildly."

But he has the tiniest hint of a smile in his eyes and voice. And it is a simple truth of life that _Arthur doesn't smile_ (when he's working, anyway; she hasn't seen him except for training, so she supposes he could be quite different when he's just lounging around the house). She debates saying something like, 'and yet you seem fond of him.'

A knock on the door keeps her from speaking.

When Arthur answers the door, there is a man on the other side. Tall-ish, mischievous blue-green eyes, neat dark hair, charming level of scruff, rakish grin.

Tak isn't fooled by this would-be casual look. Everything about the man is carefully cultivated. He is as controlled, in his own way, as Arthur. An expert confidence man. Trained nonchalance, practiced grace, beautiful mess. He is everything that would get under Arthur's skin, and she thinks that may be the point.

"Did you miss me, darling?" the man drawls, leaning into Arthur's space. His accent is one of the more careful varieties of British—perhaps East African—and his voice is velvety, like a soft-furred cat slinking its way along.

"You can think so if you like," Arthur answers blankly, apparently unruffled. Tak knows better; she can see the suddenly-relaxed line of Arthur's shoulders, the fractional lowering of his eyelashes, the tiny instinctive cant of his hips closer to this newcomer. "This is Tak. Tak, this is Eames. I apologize in advance for his behavior."

Those blue-green eyes turn to her, appraising and perhaps a bit hostile despite the grin still gracing Eames' lips. She guesses that it's natural for a con-artist to be uncomfortable at his first meeting with another con-artist—waiting to see how his skill measures against hers, what her code of honor is, whether she'll see him as a threat—and to be honest, she's used to being immediately disliked. He takes her hand and kisses her knuckles. "Charmed, my dear."

She arches an eyebrow. "Let me guess: your role models are James Bond, Captain Kirk, and Han Solo."

He laughs, and some of the hostility leaves his eyes and stance. "I like her, darling. She's got a sense of fun—something you sorely lack."

Arthur snorts. "If you say so. Come on, Yusuf is waiting." And he turns smartly on his heel and stalks to the PASIV on the coffee table.

Eames playfully bows and gestures for Tak to go first.

Yusuf comes out of the bedroom with a little syringe and a neck pillow for Tak (who is too short to sleep comfortably in most chairs, even for a few minutes).

"Thanks, Yusuf," she says as she slips the pillow around the back of her neck.

"Are we planning on staying long?" Eames asks.

"She gets cricks easily," Yusuf explains. "Y'know. Chairs don't fit her."

"She could try the bed," Eames points out.

"I'm sure she's not comfortable being unconscious on a bed with a batch of strange men about," Yusuf tells him primly before slipping the syringe into a small slot on the PASIV (adjusting the mixture, Tak thinks, but she can't be sure since she doesn't know very much about the machine yet). "Especially when one of them's you."

Arthur unbuttons the left cuff of his shirt and folds the sleeve up in precise motions. "Tak and I'll go in first, Eames a few seconds later. Five minutes should be plenty of time."

"Plenty of time for what, love?" Eames asks almost idly, but Tak hears the hint of true curiosity in his tone.

"You'll see," Arthur replies. He settles into his chair and slips the PASIV lead in with a practiced motion.

Tak shudders and lets Yusuf do hers.

"This is the wrong line of work for those squeamish of needles, pet," laughs Eames.

Tak just looks at him, daring him to try and find something about her that will give her away in the dream.

And then Yusuf presses the button, and Tak and Arthur are standing in the men's room of Grand Central Station (this part of the dreamscape she's faked from Arthur's descriptions, but it should be good enough to fool the average mark). From the noise and bustle outside, it must be rush hour. She looks at the nearest mirror, into Arthur's calm face for a moment before turning to her own.

Tak thinks that most forgers must be extremely self-aware—controlling every strand of hair, every ruffle of clothing, every little expression they make. She accomplishes the same through being extremely unself-aware, by forgetting that she is a woman, and small, and ill-tempered enough to be unlikable.

She simply tells herself, _I am Arthur_, and her reflection changes to match. Neat, fastidious, always-in-control. She changes the suit slightly, to avoid alarming the projections. Now they are simply twins who dress alike, rather than doppelgangers. She tugs the bottom edge of her waistcoat in a motion she's seen Arthur make a dozen times, tips her chin up to make sure the knot of her tie is perfect.

The real Arthur is looking smug again. "He'll never know what hit him."

She arches an eyebrow at their reflections and straightens her cuffs. "Serves him right," she says in Arthur's voice. "Eames needs to be shaken up once in a while. Turnabout's fair play."

He narrows his eyes at her for a moment, as though worried she might be guessing more about him than he'd like.

She regards him placidly, with his own expression of polite disinterest. At some point or other, nearly everyone gives her that same look of _how much does she really know?_

He's been working in dream-sharing long enough to know he should watch himself around a forger. Every moment they spend together, a person reveals something about himself to those around him, and confidence operators (especially forgers) use that to predict their every action and reaction, to slip into their skin and become them—and Arthur has said himself that she'll be a gifted forger with instruction and practice.

After a moment, that train of thought seems to occur to him, because he gives a wry almost-grin. "You _are_ good," he concedes.

And because she's in-character, she simply tips her head in a nod of thanks.

They walk out into the rush hour crowds, projections detouring unconcernedly around them, sparing them only the bemused passing glance earned by any set of twins dressed alike. They stand together, hands in their pockets.

Tak senses the exact moment that Arthur senses Eames' presence. His chin lifts just a bit—perhaps a millimeter—and his eyebrows draw together.

A warm hand lands on her shoulder, tugs her closer to Arthur; Eames leans between them. "Twins, darling?" he drawls, and his breath smells like cinnamon and chocolate. "It's not even my birthday."

Tak rolls her eyes and steps away at exactly the same moment Arthur does. They face Eames with matching unimpressed frowns. "Be serious for once," she says.

He smiles at them. "Darling, you know I'm always serious."

Tak and Arthur snort.

"So," Arthur begins, taking his hands from his pockets to cross his arms over his chest. "Which one of us is Arthur?"

"You _can_ tell, can't you?" Tak adds with raised eyebrows.

"Well, you're _both_ Arthur," Eames answers cheerfully.

They roll their eyes at him again.

"Which of us is the _real_ Arthur, and which one is Tak?" Tak clarifies.

"Or doesn't a forger know a forgery when he sees one?" Arthur jabs.

Slowly, Eames stalks around them and between them in a figure-eight, coming to a stop in front of Tak. There's a spark of something new in his eyes now, something like a challenge, something like a grudging admission of her skill.

Tak keeps her gaze level and blank (and it's an interesting novelty, to view the world from this height, to look straight into a man's eyes instead of up).

"Oh, she's good," Eames murmurs.

"I told you she was," Tak and Arthur say together.

"You even smell alike," Eames notes.

"Do we?" Arthur says.

Eames watches Tak as he takes a step closer to her.

Tak knows Arthur well enough to guess that he would return the scrutiny with a touch of defiance, a sentiment of 'yes, you and I are very close, but we're working now, and you're being terribly unprofessional.' She lowers her right eyebrow a bit.

Eames gives an impish little grin and leans in.

She darts her gaze to his lips and says, flatly, "Don't. You. _Dare_."

"Dare to what, darling?" Eames laughs, putting an arm around her shoulders.

"I'm not falling for that."

"Oh, come now; where's the harm in a little fraternization, hm?"

She raises her eyebrows. "So I'm Arthur, am I?"

"And I'm Tak?" Arthur adds.

"Mm," Eames agrees. "You can't hide from me, love."

Arthur smiles.

Tak drops the illusion and smiles, too. "Wrong," she says.

"Maybe you should've kissed her," Arthur suggests.

"You cheated," Eames decides, scowling at them and taking his hand from Tak's shoulder.

"And how did we do that?" Arthur prompts. "I didn't tell her a thing about you until just before you arrived—and all I said then was that you're a rude surprise."

Tak winks. "I'm just that good."

Arthur draws a gun.

Then Yusuf is putting down his crossword and taking the needle out of Tak's wrist.

"This girl is absolutely fascinating," Eames announces, but his tone suggests very firm distrust. "She, ah…_is_ aware of the legal disposition of our work?"

"There are many kinds of thieves, Mr. Eames," Tak says blandly. "And many reasons for stealing. If I object to a job, I won't take it. Pretty simple, don't you think?"

He looks at her, and that spark of challenge is back in his eyes. "Is it?"

She slips the pillow from around her neck. "Yes," she tells him.

**.End.**


	8. Beautiful Mess

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue, i wouldn't do that to you). language: g.

**pairing:** a little bit of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; Arthur has been training Tak in dream-sharing for a week or so.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) "payback for the M60" is a reference to **Frazzled**. 2) the "beautiful mess" is actually another name for a short-term con called the paramour scheme. i forget the jargon name for it, but the gist is that the con plays a pretty temptress (or handsome tempter) and gets the mark to give her money or presents (either in exchange for sexual favors or because the con is a 'good luck charm'), and usually makes off with the mark's wallet in the morning. by calling attention to Eames' modus operandi, Tak is actually making a veiled accusation that he's working a con on Arthur. 3) "golden goose" is a common misphrased reference to Aesop's fable about the goose that laid the golden eggs. 4) "sub cons" is the phrase Nolan used to identify the actively hostile elements of a subject's subconscious.

* * *

><p><strong>Beautiful Mess<strong>

"How long have the two of you been a couple?" Tak asks after the second round of hide-and-seek dreaming with Arthur and Eames.

From his seat near the PASIV device, Yusuf makes a strangled noise. Amusement? Incredulity?

Eames gives Tak a slow smile. "What do you think, dear?"

After looking at him a moment longer, she shakes her head. "Nevermind, you aren't. He just _wants_ you to be."

Arthur doesn't falter in unrolling his cuff. His blank mask doesn't even flicker. But she sees a muscle in his arm tense. "That's preposterous," he says dispassionately. Which part of what she said he finds preposterous is unclear. It's a lie either way.

Eames laughs and stretches. "You and I shall get along famously, precious. But do be careful you don't tell too many of his secrets, or he may decide to let something terrible happen to you someday."

She gives a casual half-shrug she learned from watching some powerful middle-aged woman with sly eyes and white hair. "I make it a point to tell one or two of _everyone's_ secrets, Mr. Eames, to remind them that I _know_ their secrets." Besides, this is payback for the M60; Arthur needs to know that she takes feuds very seriously.

He regards her with an interested little smirk. "I almost want to know what sort of secrets you've gleaned about me."

"You don't," Arthur cautions wryly.

"You don't," Yusuf agrees. "One secret you don't want aired she'll tell in front of other people. If she likes you, she'll tell the nastier one just to you, when you're alone together."

But there is always the chance, the threat, that Tak might tell the nastier secret to _everyone_. It's a little gamble of intimidation that her uncle taught her.

"And what of your secrets did she share with the class, Yusuf?" Eames asks.

"He loves bad Bollywood soundtracks," says Arthur.

"They're not _bad_," Yusuf complains.

Eames crosses his legs and turns to face Tak, challenging again. His expression is fearless and fierce, and she imagines this is the sort of face that secretly makes Arthur breathless. "Well, here we all are. You've known me for ten minutes, plus dream-time. Have you got one of my secrets to tell yet?"

She pulls her feet up onto her chair and turns so that she faces him as well. "You like to gamble specifically because you're bad at it unless you cheat," she says crisply.

For an instant, she sees a flash of something like fear in his gaze, but he laughs it off quickly and slips gracefully to his feet, headed for the coffee maker in the corner. "I'm sure there's some complex psychology behind that pronouncement. What a delightful little parlor trick."

No complex psychology; she just knows his type. There aren't many types of con, after all. Eames thinks of himself as a born loser. He knows how to cheat, knows how easy it is to win if he does, but he likes to lose. Losing lets him know all is right in the world. Maybe it lets him know he's not dreaming.

"There's a phrase for what you've decided to pretend to be, Mr. Eames," she goes on. "_Bellissimo disordine_. Beautiful mess. A special kind of partly-civilized scoundrel. Rough, impulsive, unpredictable. It makes the rich curious. It makes the powerful envious and covetous. And it makes the rigidly controlled very uneasy." She stares at the back of his head. "Did you decide to make that mask permanent before or after you met Arthur?"

He freezes for a split-second, shoulders back and squared, chin high. She's caught him, and he doesn't like that. Then he spins with a wicked little grin. "Was that Italian? The girl has a talented tongue!"

"You're still a better forger, Mr. Eames."

"And what makes you say that, my dear?"

She tilts her head to the side. "I had to ask, didn't I?"

That seems to please him. He winks at her. "So you did, precious. But you guess secrets very well, and in this line of work, that's the moneymaker. Arthur, you've found yourself a pretty little golden goose."

"The eggs were gold, not the goose," Arthur corrects.

"If you say so, darling. I endorse her whole-heartedly. In fact, I think we should get her and Ariadne started with that…what was it? Synergistic architecture?"

Tak feels an instant spark of interest. "Synergistic architecture?" she echoes.

Arthur glances up from a little black notebook. "Mm. Making multiple levels of a shared dream as identical as possible to help hide the depth of the dream and allow a greater number of changes before the mark's sub cons react. Only an exceptionally talented pair of architects—like you and Ariadne—would be able to create a perfectly matched set. It takes attention to detail, a sense of artistry…"

"There's someone else who can build like I do?" she asks—no, demands, and feels like a rude, too-eager little girl (but is too experienced to apologize for the slip).

Eames utters a rich laugh, and Tak doesn't miss the pleased flicker of Arthur's mouth and eyes. He really is _so_ obvious, in his own way.

"Oh, you've found a true treat for our dear pet," Eames notes.

Arthur shows his mysterious little smirk. He cuts a lovely and statuesque figure like that, all clean lines and confidence, and she files the sight away as something that puts a silly grin on Eames' face. "A good point man knows how to motivate his team."

"That you do, my love."

Because she has trained with him for two weeks, Tak knows Arthur is about to roll his eyes. And because she has learned so much in the brief time since Eames' arrival, she knows he actually enjoys the graceless flirtation.

**.End.**


	9. Apprentice

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. Diet Angst™. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: g.

**pairing:** a little bit of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; Tak has just left after meeting Eames.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) another one of those foundational fears that i like so much: having your valuables (material or otherwise) replaced without your knowledge. it touches on our basic belief that we alone are intimate with our favorite belongings, and also on our belief that those belongings are secure. it's a scary enough concept when applied to material objects (your wedding ring, your favorite shirt, a book your father once gave you), but it's worse when applied to _people_, such as with changelings—the idea that someone not only stole your baby, but replaced it with something so similar that you didn't even notice at first. 2) Arthur explains the proverb about living with wild tigers. when in hostile territory, one should always be ready to act, one should be constantly vigilant, and one should never expose a weakness to the enemy. 3) "to suss something out" is British for "to figure something out. (not to be confused with "acting suss," which means "acting suspicious.") 4) "poppet" is British for "child" or "doll." (yes, it's related to the word "puppet")

* * *

><p><strong>Apprentice<strong>

Arthur reviews the day's events very carefully before he speaks. "What do you _really_ think of her?" he asks.

Eames feigns ignorance, doesn't even bother to open his eyes. "What ever can you mean, love?"

Unconvinced, Arthur grabs Eames' feet (crossed at the ankles next to Arthur's laptop) and lifts, causing the forger's lazily tipping chair to overbalance.

"Cruel, darling, absolutely cruel!" Eames complains after recovering from the near-fall. "What do I think of your little prodigy?"

"Cobb's," Arthur corrects.

Eames snorts and leans forward to prop his elbow where his feet had been. "Cobb is her employer; _you're_ the one training her."

"In the basics. If you acknowledge that she's got the raw talent, _you'll_ be the one to train her. _I_ think she's got it, but I can't teach her to forge. So what do _you_ think of her?"

"Hmmm," Eames says disinterestedly. "I don't think much of her at all."

He doesn't buy that for a minute. Eames is not the sort to belittle or dismiss someone else's talent—and Tak _is_ talented, even if she's also abrasive.

"You're a liar, Mr. Eames."

"And much worse things besides, darling," Eames agrees with a fond grin. "All right. She's a bloody little busybody, but she has the gift. She shifts forms easily and latches onto the little details that stick with us subconsciously."

"I told you so," Arthur announces with justified smugness.

Eames laughs, and Arthur catches a twinkle in those captivating blue eyes that reminds him of the way Mal used to look at Dom…a twinkle of '_you're so clever_' and '_I'm crazy about you_.'

The tips of Arthur's ears burn with the beginning of a blush, and he goes back to the work waiting on his laptop, telling himself that even if it's not an official job, they're still doing something work-related. None of them need the added distraction of some sort of fumbling romance while they're trying to train Tak.

_Now_ is the province of Arthur the Consummate Professional, who knows that Eames is a coworker and therefore off-limits. _Later_ can be the province of Arthur the Rumpled Bookworm, who has been wavering on the cusp of asking Eames to dinner for nearly six years now.

"She fooled me very well earlier," Eames quietly admits, and the smile is gone from his face. "I honestly didn't think there was such a thing as a person who could flawlessly impersonate you, but I hadn't the slightest idea which of you was which. As a forger, it was rather humbling. As a man, it was really sort of terrifying."

"Being fooled by a woman?" Arthur asks, amused.

"Being unable to pick out something precious from a copy of it."

An odd sentiment, from a man who makes fakes for a living.

Or not _odd_, perhaps. More like…ironic. No, the oddity is that Eames seems so surprised and unbalanced by it all.

Arthur types a little faster, raises his eyebrows. "Well, part of the job of a forger is to know a forgery when you see one. Taking an apprentice should be a good workout for you."

Eames sits up and leans a little closer. "I'm serious. It's like reaching into your pocket or wherever and finding your totem gone. Suddenly, you can't verify the authenticity of _anything_."

Arthur pauses. He looks at Eames quite earnestly and says, "A long time ago, a very wise man told me that there are three rules to living among wild tigers: never turn your back, never take your eyes off them, and never let them smell your blood."

After a moment, the forger looks guardedly disappointed. "You're right, of course," Eames tells him somewhat stiffly. "It could be that she's just good at sussing out people's secrets, but it's more likely that I'm…I've become complacent. I suppose this is where I say it shan't happen again. Back tomorrow to start teaching the dear little poppet the trade, hm? You have my numbers. Goodnight, Mr. Clarke."

And before Arthur can formulate an appropriate reply, Eames has left. The hotel suite seems colder and dimmer.

He feels very awkward for the first time in several years, and wonders when he became so good at living among tigers, himself.

**.End.**


	10. Don't or Can't

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. people who believe in squeezing every last drop of melodrama out of a minor argument (and people who find that annoying). OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: g.

**pairing:** a little bit of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the day after Eames and Tak meet.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) mentioning Mal's photo albums is a reference to **The Student**. 2) i don't know about you, but in any kind of interpersonal relationship (friendship, coworker, romantic, whatever) nothing really annoys me more than when the other person is clearly mad at you and refuses to say why. crap like "you know what you did" and "if you don't know, i won't tell you" and "why don't you just think about it a little longer" are the icing on that obnoxious cake. 3) "in among tigers" is a reference to an old proverb about being in hostile or uncertain surroundings (Arthur explained it in **Apprentice**). 4) "to get on" is British for "to get along."

* * *

><p><strong>Don't or Can't<strong>

Eames is very quiet. It sets Arthur's teeth on edge.

The entire hotel suite is silent, save for the hum of Arthur's laptop and the occasional hiss of the air conditioning.

He wonders why Eames came so early when he knows Tak isn't coming until four. (Yusuf won't be coming today, since the last mixture worked fine for Tak and Arthur will be staying out to monitor them.)

When he risks a look, Eames is sitting by the balcony door, late morning sunlight through diaphanous curtains casting his face in a pale glow while he turns a poker chip over and over in his fingers (it may be his totem; Arthur doesn't ask these things, and he's never seen Eames check it during or after an extraction).

Arthur thinks immediately of Mal's photo albums, of page after page of Dom's smile, Mal's smile, James' and Phillipa's and even _Arthur's_. Eames is there, of course (thief or not, he's been friends with the Cobbs too long to avoid Mal's camera lens), but never smiling.

Irrationally, absurdly, Arthur thinks that if Eames died today, no one would ever believe he'd smiled.

He puts his hand into his pocket and fingers his totem, checking the bumps and grooves and nicks, feeling for the exact balance, because the Eames sitting with him in the hotel suite looks like he stepped out of one of Mal's albums.

"Have you run out of smiles, Mr. Eames?" Arthur says without meaning to.

Pale eyes slide toward him lazily. "I'm in among tigers, aren't I?"

"I don't understand why you're upset," he confesses.

"Don't you?" Eames asks with venom, softly hissed words chased by a frosty and disdainful frown. Then he slowly closes his eyes. "No, I suppose you can't."

Arthur is offended by the implication: that he's lacking some grand life experience, that he's somehow emotionally stunted. He's not (he has perfectly normal relationships with his mother and his sister and his nephew), it's just _Eames_ that he can never seem to read.

It's _Eames_, dammit, and his need to be unfathomable. Some stupid enigmatic forger thing that keeps him from saying what he means like a _normal person_. It's not Arthur's fault.

Arthur feels lost. He thumbs the center dot of the five.

Eames slumps to lean closer to the balcony door, and the sunlight casts part of his face into dim shadows eroded slightly by the warm light of the desk lamp. The clash of the two light sources obscures much of the passage of time. Eames looks young, and sad, and far-away. He purses his lips slightly. "I thought," he begins, warily. "I thought that perhaps we were getting on, you and I."

Arthur laughs a little, but feels it ring hollow. "When, in the whole of our acquaintance, have you known us to 'get on,' Mr. Eames?"

Dark brows draw together, pale eyes look down and away. "You're right, of course," Eames says dully.

He wants to take it back. He wants to explain that it was meant teasingly.

He wants to apologize…but he has a personal rule about apologizing to people over the age of ten, and it involves having made a mistake bad enough to endanger lives. So he drags his eyes back to his laptop and keeps up his preliminary research of potential jobs.

All through lunch and the hours after, Eames clings to his morose and chilly silence, until Arthur feels like shouting at him.

At exactly four o'clock (she's _definitely_ Saito's niece), a card unlocks the door and Tak walks in. She dumps a bag of textbooks next to the coffee table and sits down in her chair, radiating excitement.

"So," she says. "Let's do it! Teach me all about forging."

Eames animates at last, though dourly. He gets up from his chair and rolls his right sleeve. "This will _not_ be easy," he tells her. "I'll be looking much harder today, and you won't have Mr. Clarke helping you. And you certainly won't be let to copy someone you know that well. No Mr. Clarke, no Mr. Cobb, no Mr. Saito."

Arthur notices that Tak doesn't flinch when Eames says Saito's name…the T is crisp like hers, even if the O isn't quite perfect.

She shifts her knees a little and blinks. "Something happened after I left yesterday. Arthur, what did you do to poor Mr. Eames?"

"I've been trying to figure that out," Arthur admits glumly.

Stupid forgers. Stupid maudlin, melodramatic, 'I'm a suffering artist' _forgers_.

Eames opens the PASIV case and hooks up. "Never you mind that, you've got work to do."

The girl has a contemplative look on her face while she puts on her neck pillow and settles back to let Arthur put the twin needles in.

"Start us at ten minutes, if you will, Mr. Clarke," Eames says.

"You really think it'll take you that long to find me?" Tak asks.

"I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, my dear," he replies. "Try not to miss our collective wit too much, Mr. Clarke."

"Go to sleep, Mr. Eames," Arthur murmurs, and presses the button.

**.End.**


	11. Beneath a Mask

Tak 'n Eames. sometimes beneath a mask is...ANOTHER MASK. XD

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. discussion of theft. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: g.

**pairing:** a little bit of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the day after Eames and Tak meet.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) you may have guessed, but the American accent Tak uses isn't her natural accent. 2) again, Cat and Miss Golightly are references to Breakfast at Tiffany's. 3) and now Tak's a fangirl. she and Ariadne will have great fun.

* * *

><p><strong>Beneath a Mask<strong>

The first official session of Tak's 'apprenticeship' with Eames was a much tougher, more cutthroat version of the hide-and-seek games of the day before. Their playing fields started with a crowded opera house and got gradually smaller and more sparsely populated. By the end of it, they were standing together in an elevator in Tokyo Tower, Tak pretending to be one of a handful of small schoolchildren while Eames panned a sharp gaze over tourists and elevator girls.

She was reprimanded twice for her attention span, for the nervous flutter of changing faces between glimpses. Pick one. Focus. Real people can't keep taking off faces and putting new ones on.

It's utterly exhausting, because Eames works her at a punishing nonstop pace (broken only by his sharp critiques), seeming oddly subdued compared to the first day of their acquaintance. It could be anything, she supposes, but her instincts tell her that Arthur managed to say something that upset Eames the night before.

Whenever she feels a curl of frustrated anger while Eames lectures her, she reminds herself that it's like sculpting, like painting. He's pointing out the weaknesses in her style, because she can't see them herself. She's an apprentice. He is the master.

She focuses on that, and on the dismayed frown that has taken up residence on Arthur's face today, rather than on the fact that once again a _man_ is telling her what she's doing wrong.

Arthur stops them after the fifth session. Too many in one day, he says, and starts to list off potential side-effects to keep an eye out for. Headache, nausea, vertigo, dizziness, abdominal cramps, weakness or heaviness of limbs, chills…

Tak pointedly forgets the list.

It's nearly six, so Arthur orders room service for their dinner. His choices are refined and expensive, just to the tasteful side of lavish, and she feels a little bit awkward about the amount of money being spent. Eames laughs (the precise angle of Arthur's gaze flutters for a moment, a coquettish move she likes and will have to practice in order to mimic), and tells her that the point of being a con-artist is to sweet talk everything you want out of other people's wallets.

She shakes her head. "I can't do that to Arthur. It feels…wrong. Dirty. I don't mind stealing from people, or accepting gifts under false pretenses…but having someone spend the money knowing exactly what I am… It's like they're buying something from me that I don't think I want to sell."

Arthur seems perplexed by the notion, but Eames has a glimmer of understanding in his blue-green gaze.

After dinner, Eames grabs up his coat and insists on walking Tak to the sidewalk and staying with her until her cab arrives.

"It takes some of us that way, precious," he confides in a low voice. "The greatest forgers I've ever met are people who…are uncomfortable in their own skin. It lets them shed it more easily. You're a sharp one—sharp as needles—so I'm sure you've guessed that one of my secrets is that I'm the same. As you said, this…beautiful mess…is a mask. A very firm, very well-rehearsed mask, but a mask nonetheless. Perhaps you can even guess what's beneath that mask."

She looks up at him, and he seems so tall and wise and warm. "I suppose…you're somehow ashamed to be attracted to another man? Or you used to be. So you started forging so that you could be attracted to men, flirt with them, be with them…without being afraid of their judgment," she decides. After all, gender is one of the easier things to change about oneself in dreams. She often does it the other way around in real life, dressing like a boy so she can be loud and pushy and opinionated.

He smiles and rubs her shoulder. The tension of earlier has left him now. "You'll be all right," he murmurs, like he's telling his past self instead of her.

Tak smiles back. "You're a perfectly lovely man, Mr. Eames," she tells him, and lets her accent slip. "Arthur is very lucky."

"You sound like Audrey Hepburn," he chuckles, and kisses her cheek in a way that is completely nonsexual but would nevertheless make Arthur squirm with jealousy.

"What's your first name, Mr. Eames?"

He closes one eye. "What's your first, last, or whatever, Miss Tak?"

She wrinkles her nose. "Is Eames even your real last name?"

Opening his eye again, he raises his eyebrows. "We are masters of disguise, you and I; what do we need with a name that doesn't change as easily as we do?"

"I see your point, Cat."

Eames gives her a little mock-bow. "Thank you, Miss Golightly."

Her cab has arrived, so she ducks into it.

That night, she dreams of standing on the curb with Eames. Rather than Arthur's unshakeability, Eames possesses the ability to bend, and that can be much more useful for weathering certain kinds of disaster. It reminds her of her uncle…of being very small and seeing him smile and give way rather than face destruction.

Tak decides she admires the hell out of the man. Eames will be her yardstick now. She'll judge the extent of her abilities by how well she can imitate him; copying a mysterious ball of illusions in a realm of subconscious thought.

If she can ever copy Eames as easily and thoroughly as she does Arthur, she will be very proud of herself.

If she can ever copy Eames well enough to fool Arthur, she will consider herself the greatest forger in the world.

**.End.**


	12. Breakfast at Tiffany's

when in Beverly Hills, you might as well pretend you're rich. or, y'know. pick rich people's pockets and _then_ pretend you're rich.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). light slash leanings. discussion of theft. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: g.

**pairing:** a little bit of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the day after **Beneath a Mask**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) Ariadne is such a fangirl. half the time she spends around Arthur and Eames, she's probably thinking 'omg, shut up and kiss already.' 2) the French prefer their coffee with lots and lots and lots of cream. that's probably what Ariadne's used to, depending on how long she's been going to school in Paris. 3) i have a vague recollection of a Tiffany's on North Rodeo, which is near the L'Ermitage. for all i know, it's gone now, elbowed out by Versace or Vuitton. we'll pretend it's still there in whatever timeframe/alternate universe Inception lives in. 4) the Tiffany's references continue. all the best Tiffany stores are big, with huge display windows showcasing their work. and not just jewelry—silver, engraving, crystal, leaded glass...anything beautiful and luxurious that Tifany's makes can and does appear in their window displays. 5) "i'm just _crazy_ about Tiffany's..." is from Holly's speech about 'the mean reds,' probably some of the most famous lines in the movie. 6) now you know where they got Arthur's new cufflinks.

* * *

><p><strong>Breakfast at Tiffany's<strong>

Ariadne, when she arrives, turns out to have many things in common with Tak. They are small and unassuming and female. They are smart and curious and creative. They love puzzles, love challenges, love the fun and freedom of dream-shaping. After 'hi, I'm Ariadne,' and 'I'm Tak,' 'Tak, is that Thai?' and 'no, it's short for Mizutaki,' they spend hours talking excitedly about anything and everything.

The principle difference between them is that Ariadne is a _storyteller_ and Tak is a _liar_ (she is not and has never been ashamed of being a liar, but there's something sweet-natured in Ariadne's fictions that is absent from most of Tak's).

Sometime around noon, Eames sashays through the door. He's wearing an ugly olive sweater over ugly brown corduroys, and he looks much happier than he did while they were waiting for Tak's cab. Tak makes a mental note that the sheer bad taste of Eames' clothing seems to follow his mood (garish paisley and tweed the first day, subdued honeydew and khakis yesterday, when he'd been upset with Arthur).

"Ah, our dear little kittens have met," he yawns.

"Mr. Eames, you lazy cad," Ariadne laughs. "Jet-lagged, huh?"

Tak doubts it's jet-lag, but Ariadne didn't see the way the two men were acting the day before (sulky, confused Arthur and surly, miffed Eames).

"Good morning, darling," Eames calls on his way to the coffee pot.

_Darling_ again, when all the day before it was _Mr. Clarke_, in very sharp, very cold tones. Either Arthur has managed to apologize, or Eames has simply decided to forgive him. Tak considers the odds of the former to be very close to the odds of being struck by a meteor.

Arthur doesn't bother to look away from his laptop. "It's five past noon, Mr. Eames," he replies with a nonchalance he doesn't feel (Tak can tell by relieved lift of his chin).

"And have you been counting the minutes we were apart?" Eames counters.

"Only because you are, as usual, _late_."

"They are so cute at that age," Ariadne snorts.

Out of the corner of her eye, Tak sees Arthur's chin dip back down. Embarrassment? Displeasure?

And because she's watching, because Eames is her idol now and something worth study, she sees the flicker in his mask—a brief crease between his eyebrows. _Interesting_.

"Have we got cream?" Eames asks through a yawn that Tak thinks is feigned. "Or just milk?"

"Of course there's cream," says Ariadne with a smile. "You think I'd drink mine without, like some kind of barbarian?"

Tak watches as Eames pours what must be five or six spoons of sugar into his coffee before topping it off with enough cream to turn it a pale beige.

"That's disgusting," Arthur asserts without looking.

Tak doesn't normally like coffee. She thinks she may try it with five spoons of sugar and a quarter cup of heavy cream.

"Oh, shush, Arthur," Ariadne grouses.

"Coffee should be black—" Arthur insists.

"Lalalalala!" she says loudly, ears plugged with her fingers.

"—with two spoons of sugar at most," he finishes.

"Blech!"

Tak sees the edge of Arthur's smile. She also sees the tense rise of Eames' shoulders.

_Oh._

It's Ariadne. Sweet, funny, brilliant Ariadne. Ariadne is what makes those tiny cracks in Eames' tomcat mask of ego and confidence. Even at his age, some part of him must be whispering that he's wrong to adore Arthur so much, must be waiting for some woman who fits neatly into Arthur's ordered life to come along and take the only thing Eames really cares about. Maybe that's what they quarreled over; maybe that's what killed Eames' smile for a whole day.

Not necessarily jealousy…insecurity? Whatever it is, she doesn't want another day of Arthur being awkward and Eames being snappish (because that _sucked_).

"Poor slob without a name," Tak says with a grin, and she sees the sad little crack in Eames' mask widen just a bit before he beams at her.

"You know, precious, I think there's one a few blocks away."

Ariadne seems confused. Not a Hepburn fan, Tak thinks a little sadly.

"It's a little late for it, Mr. Eames, but would you like to go to breakfast with me?"

"My dear Miss Tak, I should _love_ to." He offers his arm with a charming grin.

She stands and takes it, laughing. "We'll be back in an hour or so," she says.

"See that you are, please," Arthur commands with a glance at his watch. "You and Ariadne have a lot of work to do."

Half an hour later, they're standing arm-in-arm in front of warmly lit display windows. They have croissants, just like the movie.

"I'm just _crazy_ about Tiffany's," Eames sighs happily. "The quietness and the proud look of it…"

"Nothing very bad could happen to you there," Tak finishes.

When she looks up at him, he's staring through the glass doors in a vague, nostalgic sort of way. She follows his gaze and sees a bored-looking young boy trailing after a fur-clad older woman.

"I've decided that I really admire you, Cat," she tells him.

"Is that so, Miss Golightly?"

"Mm. It'll take ages and ages of practice, but I want to be as good a forger as you."

"Oh, I don't know," he says mildly. "You're already aces at finding secrets." He jogs her arm to make her look at him, and when she does, he smiles. "Sharp as needles."

She looks back at the glitz and glitter in the window. "Maybe."

"Definitely," he corrects. "Arthur told you _I_ was a rude surprise, but I've never met anyone, man or woman, who could see through me the way you do."

"I can't see through you at all," she denies. "I just know a mask when I see one. Japanese wear masks all the time, so I've been looking at them all my life. Angry masks and blank masks and smiling masks…" After a moment, she feels the need to assure him, "It's a very _good_ mask."

"Do you know how to lie, Miss Golightly?"

"Very well when I have to, thanks."

"Good, because the first rule of a forger is this: never tell the truth when a pretty lie will do."

She tightens her hand at his elbow, feeling the ugly sweater bunch under her fingers. "I think I see."

He presses his other hand over hers on his arm (his hands are rough, but warm). "The truth is the most potent weapon there is against a forger, so you must learn to protect it well—better than your totem, all right?"

She nods and leans against him; he smells like coffee and Calvin Klein, and a fabric softener she can't quite name. He's been very kind to her for the almost-two-days they've been acquainted, but she suspects he's the sort who knows drug dealers and arms smugglers, sleeps with a gun under his pillow, and hides tattoos under his shirts (like her uncle, in fact). "All right, Cat."

He tugs her along a little way, past chandeliers and filigree and engraved silver.

"Do you have any money with you?" she asks, toying with a half-formed thought.

"A few hundred in cash. And a 'creatively acquired' platinum card that probably hasn't been cancelled yet. And this is a good neighborhood for picking up more, if we need it. Why?"

"You should bring Arthur back a souvenir, I think. Some nice cufflinks, perhaps. Yellow diamonds would be divine on him. And it never hurts to make a man feel guilty for not paying you as much attention as you deserve."

"Oh, poppet, how devious!" he exclaims happily. "We're going to be such famous friends, you and I."

**.End.**


	13. Sunshine

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue, god no, and she's not likely to get any of the guys). language: g.

**pairing:** some Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the middle of Tak's second week of training, the day she meets Ariadne.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) that is, in fact, the kind of personality a Tiffany's box has. "Here I am. I was expensive, but who cares." i (big, strong manly-man that i am) nearly fainted the first time i got a gift from Tiffany's. 2) if you've never seen the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, i recommend seeing it at least once. just because it's a fixture of classic cinema, and Audrey Hepburn's character (Holly Golightly) is intriguing. anyway, Holly owns a cat that she calls Cat—she says she won't name the cat (or buy proper furniture) until she finds a place that she belongs to. until then, she and Cat will be a couple of 'poor nameless slobs.' 3) Tiffany's is famous for high quality yellow diamonds. now you know. 4) diamonds symbolize 'forever.' normally, they would only be a gift between lovers or close family members (it's not considered bad taste for a mother to buy her daughter diamond jewelry, for instance). in most other circumstances, a gift of diamonds is presumptuous and rude.

* * *

><p><strong>Sunshine<strong>

Arthur goes back to his desk after a brief bathroom break to see a small black box on the center of his laptop keyboard. Silver embossed letters on the top say _TIFFANY & CO_.

Tak and Eames returned from their breakfast outing while Arthur was out of the room; she sits at the coffee table with Ariadne, he is making himself a mug of tea from the electric kettle in the corner.

The point man frowns at the box, pauses in the act of unrolling his sleeves.

For several seconds, he just stares at the embossed lettering, the small caps somehow lending a dignified air to the box.

Dark, modest, tasteful. Unpretentious and unapologetic. _Here I am—why yes, I did cost a fortune, but who's counting…_

His first instinct is suspicion, a question of who is trying to bribe him and why.

"Is…this…?" he mumbles, perplexed.

"For you? Yes," Tak says. He hears her slip her shoes off and rearrange herself in her chair. "And before you make any crass, mean implications, the contents of that box are bought and paid for. Mr. Eames and I may be a pair of poor nameless slobs, but we have enough class not to steal from Tiffany's."

"I see," Arthur replies neutrally, though he suspects the money they paid with was stolen.

His mind absently connects the phrase 'poor nameless slobs' to the name Tiffany's. Breakfast at Tiffany's? He blinks at the box, wondering whether Tak is Holly Golightly or Eames is. She's always trying on masks, but Eames is the one who can't let go of them (and it's absurdly amusing, the idea of Tak calling Eames 'Miss Golightly'). They probably call it the other way around, another little lie about identity.

He lifts the leather box and opens it (the hinges are silent). He closes it again with a snap and sits down very quickly.

"These," Arthur begins, but can't think what to say next. His heart is thudding away inside his chest for no particular reason, and he suspects a blush may be trying to creep its way from his ears onto his cheeks.

"Cufflinks, darling," Eames says helpfully, his voice all smoke and honey. "Like little drops of sunshine."

Eames has given him diamonds.

Arthur feels a hysterical giggle wanting to escape, but he manages to swallow it. Two-and-a-half-carat vivid yellow diamonds in little nests of matching gold filigree. Little drops of sunshine, indeed. Bright and warm, and in the same underappreciated level of classy good taste as handmade Italian Oxfords and Cartier watches.

They'll go very nicely with almost all of his suits, and are more luxurious than his usual cufflinks by several orders of magnitude. There's just something about a Brioni with French cuffs that begs for diamond cufflinks, but up to this point he's ignored that and spent the money on suits instead—it isn't that Arthur couldn't afford a forty thousand dollar pair of cufflinks, just that he'd rather have six (perfectly tailored designer) suits.

That's the point of gifts, perhaps…giving someone something he wouldn't think to get for himself.

Eames sidles up. "Shall I?"

Still slightly stunned, Arthur obediently holds out his wrist while Eames opens the box, draws out one of the cufflinks, and fastens Arthur's cuff.

"Mr. Eames, I know diamonds when I see them," he manages. He can't quite decide what sort of sentiment he's meant to be taking from the gift, or how he's meant to feel about it.

_Eames_ has given him _diamonds_.

That blush is _definitely_ making itself known by now. Eames' fingers are warm and slightly rough against the vulnerable skin of Arthur's wrist.

"That's brilliant," Eames praises while he fastens the other cuff. "I've often been fooled by fakes, I'm ashamed to admit. I thought to myself, _Arthur needs better cufflinks_. Honestly, pet, you have more Prada and Gucci in your closet than any two women combined, yet you insist on the most boring, functional cufflinks known to man."

Arthur understands that he's been obliquely forgiven, and it makes him feel guilty for never having apologized (for never really having figured out what he'd done wrong).

Arthur is dully aware of Tak and Ariadne snickering.

**.End.**


	14. Spilling Secrets

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). slash leanings. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: pg (for one use of damn).

**pairing:** undertones of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the middle of Tak's second week of training, the day after **Sunshine**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) am i the only one who starts to read the first line in the tune of 12 Days of Christmas? no? totally unintentional, i assure you. and i apologize profusely to those of you who now have the song stuck in your heads. 2) CIGARETTES ARE DELIGHTFUL. but so are cancer-free lungs and being able to run a mile without coughing up a lung. i miss my old brand of cigs, but e-cigs are really much better for me (and cheaper, overall). 3) the Kahala! oh, man. that place is amazing. resorts are really pricey, but if you absolutely need a de-stressing vacation, they're worth it. 4) as always, the stuff about Cat, Hepburn, and Miss Golightly are all references to Breakfast at Tiffany's. 5) "peaky" is British for "mildly ill." 6) "tetchy" is British for "touchy" or "snappish." it exists in American English, too, but i don't think i've ever heard it from an American who wasn't also a fan of British authors. 7) "get back at him for the M60" is a reference to **Frazzled**. 8) i held off as long as i could on making a crack about the squinting. i couldn't stop myself anymore. it's...it's just too fun.

* * *

><p><strong>Spilling Secrets<strong>

On the second day of synergistic architecture, Tak and Ariadne show up together, chatting like old friends.

Arthur has a feeling Tak appeared at Ariadne's hotel and went to breakfast with her.

He's let himself get distracted from his usual routine (he spent the morning making phone calls, touching base with old associates, consulting, offering timelines and estimates to prospective clients), so he's a bit snappish.

"Can we get back to level design, please?" he says sharply.

Ariadne eyes him. "Jeez, Arthur, did you skip your morning coffee?"

Tak wags a finger at the corner. "No, he's had two cups." She sniffs. "Ah, there's the problem. Arthur, please calm down and go smoke a cigarette."

"Arthur doesn't smoke," says Ariadne, blinking. "Arthur, you smoke?"

"He's a one-a-day man," Tak asserts.

Annoyed, Arthur grabs the pack from his jacket and stalks out onto the balcony.

Indoors, he can hear the girls talking again. Wonderful little phrases like _mobius-layout_ and _inverted-cone_ and _fractal skyline_ drift out through the glass door.

Rodeo Drive is gorgeous in late spring. Green trees, blue sky, warm sun. The traffic is quiet compared to much of the nearby area. In the right wind, there's salt on the air.

He really does love the L'Ermitage Beverly Hills; only the Kahala in Honolulu is more relaxing, and he doesn't often have an excuse to go to Hawai'i.

When Arthur has calmed down, he goes back inside and finds the girls sketching back-to-back on the floor beside the coffee table.

"What are you doing?" comes spilling out of his mouth before he realizes he's speaking.

"Shoosh!" Ariadne says.

"Three…two…one!" Tak counts down, and they turn and put their sketch pads together.

"Awesome!" laughs Ariadne.

Arthur frowns at being ignored. "What is?"

Ariadne waves him over.

They've drawn a pair of semicircular mazes that fit together perfectly.

Arthur can't decide whether he's impressed or murderously irritated. Sometime between all their getting-to-know-each-other yammering yesterday and this very moment, Tak and Ariadne completely nailed the underlying concepts of synergistic architecture. He has no doubt they'll be able to put it into practice.

"When do you think the cat will wander in?" Tak asks, turning the page and starting to scribble out a skyline.

Some reflex makes Arthur's hand twitch for his phone, but he ignores it. Instead, he picks up the hotel phone and orders breakfast. Belgian waffles, fruit, a spinach-and-egg-white omelet, a jug of orange juice.

"Ooh, Arthur's eating _breakfast_," says Ariadne. "The world must be coming to an end."

Tak waves her finger in the air authoritatively. "Arthur eats breakfast. He's just the sort of man who normally eats cold leftovers for breakfast."

"Ew, no way."

"Yes way. The omelet's probably his, but I will bet you—"

"No, I'm not dumb enough to bet against you, Tak."

"The waffles are for the cat," Tak declares, oozing smugness.

Arthur says nothing. She doesn't need to be encouraged, he feels; and when he lies, she just grins that obnoxious little knowing grin.

Ariadne blinks. "I don't get it," she says flatly.

"Oh, Ari, you've _really_ never seen Breakfast at Tiffany's?" Tak asks with a pout.

"Really. Not a Hepburn fan."

"Sacrilege!" gasps Tak, making Ariadne giggle.

The door opens.

"What is?" Eames asks.

"My God, Eames is up before ten!" cries Ariadne. "First Arthur eating breakfast, now Eames up before ten—Tak, what do you think the third sign of the Apocalypse will be?"

"I'd have to call my uncle and ask when he's got it scheduled," Tak quips. "The sacrilege, dear Cat, is that Ari is _not_ a Hepburn fan."

"Say it isn't so!" Eames mourns as he heads for the coffee maker. "Good morning, darling. You're looking a bit peaky today."

Arthur grunts.

Room service arrives ten minutes later.

"He ordered waffles for you," Tak tattles while the bellhop wheels in the trolley.

Arthur can't help the severely displeased frown on his face as he tips the young man (who looks terrified) and closes the door behind him.

"Were you going to pretend you'd just ordered too much food?" Eames asks shrewdly.

Damn forgers.

Arthur snatches up his omelet and sits back down at his laptop. "Eat your breakfast, Mr. Eames," he growls.

"_Tetchy_," Eames says with entirely too much cheer.

"Now that Cat's arrived, I have an announcement," Tak says in a loud, clear voice. "Ariadne once attempted to learn Spanish to woo a boy."

"Wh—how did you—" Ariadne stammers while Eames laughs.

Arthur ignores the pleased thud of his heart at the sound.

"I never said anything about that, I never told _anyone_," Ariadne goes on, and she sounds truly distressed (Eames stops laughing).

Tak hums happily. "Your pronunciation is mediocre, your sentence structure suggests you learned from a _book_ rather than a _person_, and you, dear Ari, are the kind of girl who learns things to impress boys."

There's a quiet moment (aside from the clink of a dish being uncovered and Eames' corresponding noises of appreciation).

"You," Ariadne says, sounding strangled. "You got that from just that one sentence yesterday?"

"She got Yusuf's from five bars of humming," Arthur says to reassure poor, panicky Ariadne. "She finds secrets, it's what she does. You're lucky she's only told us one of yours."

Eames chuckles with his mouth full. Arthur resists the urge to turn and see his grin. "And how many of your secrets has she told now, Arthur?"

"Three," he mutters. "And one just between us."

"I'm sure I only remember one," Eames says.

"If you weren't here or didn't realize she was telling one of my secrets, then I'm not going to enumerate them," Arthur tells him. One just because. One to get back at him for the M60 (he's fairly sure). One to amuse Ariadne.

"Enum—?" Eames half-echoes (Arthur is sure he plays dumb on purpose).

"_Enumerate_," Arthur repeats, thinking longingly of the pack of cigarettes tucked back into place inside his jacket.

"What was Eames' secret?" Ariadne asks hotly, angrily, _vengefully_.

Arthur turns, bewildered.

Her pale cheeks are splotched with pink, her dark eyes flashing. Too upset for such a little thing as learning Spanish for a boy.

But that's not right, is it? Arthur himself has been mortally ashamed of some of the things he's done to impress. He once got disgustingly falling-down drunk trying to prove he could 'keep up with the guys' (he was eighteen, _stupid_, so stupid), and ended up puking on a very pretty girl.

Tak's face has frozen. Arthur thinks she might be thinking. She tosses her head. "I don't repeat," she says. "Have Arthur tell you, if he's mean enough."

Ah, but she told two. He still doesn't know what to do with the second secret, but he certainly won't tell it. It's stupid to give something away without knowing what it's worth.

Ariadne looks at Arthur.

Arthur tries very hard not to look at Eames, who is chewing slowly. He shrugs. "He gambles because he likes to lose. Not much of a secret. Everyone knows gamblers play to lose."

It's not what she actually said (_You like to gamble specifically because you're bad at it unless you cheat._). It's not (he's fairly sure) what the actual secret is.

Ariadne won't know the difference; Tak and Eames will.

"No way," Ariadne says. "That's it?" But when she looks at Tak, Tak just raises her eyebrows innocently.

Tak takes Ariadne's hands (they both have smudges of graphite all over their fingers from sketching) and grins at her. "There's an elegance to the way we word things, Ariadne. I could have told your secret in a very different way, and you would have felt much more foolish. Remember that when I tell you another secret later, after we leave. And remember that I _collect_ other people's secrets."

The grin and the sweet, best-friends way she holds Ariadne's hands adds a misleading softness to the sinister words.

Tak rises somewhat in Arthur's esteem, but mostly because of the sheer danger associated with someone who, as she says, collects other people's secrets. She is, _really_ is, Saito's niece. She acts like his daughter, or possibly his evil gender-swapped clone.

After a moment Tak tilts her head. "Secrets are…like a kind of currency for me. So you shouldn't ask me someone else's secrets. Especially Mr. Eames' secrets—they're hard to get at, so they're very valuable. If you ask me for a secret, expect to pay for it, all right?"

Ariadne does her best impression of Dom's Squint of Intimidation (not to be confused with several other flavors of Dom Squint). "Well, let me know when I've worked my way up to an Eames secret," she says.

Arthur turns back to his laptop. "Good luck," he snorts. "That sounds like something that involves jewelry and about a year's worth of expensive dinners."

Tak appears at his elbow (literally, she's crouched there with her eyes at desktop-height) with a knowing smirk. "Why, Arthur, are you calculating the price of an Eames secret for yourself? Because I'd offer you a discount, provided there was appropriate collateral."

He lowers his right eyebrow a bit. What she would consider 'appropriate collateral' seems like a somewhat frightening subject that doesn't bear extensive contemplation. "Miss Tak, that sounds positively scandalous," he says.

"The offer's always open," she says in a singsong tone, and slinks away.

_Strange girl._

**.End.**


	15. Boku

morrrre Tak. because i had this hilarious mental image of Saito calling her up like a good doting uncle and never letting her get a word in edgewise.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: pg-13 (for f*** and some naughty Dutch and Japanese).

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the middle of Tak's second week of training, same morning as **Spilling Secrets**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) "verrek" is Dutch for the interjective form of "shit." pronounced something like "freck." you have now been educated. XD 2) "asleep by now" ... if it's mid-morning in LA, it's early morning in Japan (9am - 4am). 3) brief Japanese glossary below the notes. all you really need to know is that Tak uses very boyish Japanese.

**Japanese mini-glossary**  
>"moshi-moshi" = standard Japanese phone greeting (like the French "allo-oui")<br>"aa" = "yes" (informal)  
>"mou, isogashii" = "oh, come on, I'm busy"<br>"hai" = "yes"  
>"yada" = "no" (informal emphatic)<br>"ikitakunee" = "I don't wanna go" (masculine informal)  
>"da ga" = "yeah, but..."<br>"boku" = "I" (informal)  
>"taihen isogashii" = "I'm really busy"<br>"kuso wo tabete shine" = "eat shit and die" (emphatic)  
>"kutabare" = "f*** youf*** off"

* * *

><p><strong>Boku<strong>

Shortly after Eames finishes his waffles, a phone rings.

More specifically, Tak's backpack starts singing Rob Zombie.

"Verrek," Tak mutters (Arthur finds the Dutch swearing interesting and files it away), flinging down her sketch pad to dig for her phone. "Fucking old man should be _asleep_ by now…"

Arthur raises an eyebrow.

"Moshi-moshi," she sighs as she answers. "Aa. Mou, isogash—hai. Hai."

Arthur watches stealthily. Ariadne and Eames don't bother with stealth. They hover.

Tak flaps a hand at them as if shooing away flies. "Yada!" she whines. "Ikitakunee!"

She subsides for several seconds, glaring at the ceiling while the person on the other end of the line talks.

"Da ga," she starts to say, but is interrupted. "Boku," she tries again. "Taihen iso—" Her phone blanks, and she gapes at it.

"Wow, he really does just steamroll everyone," Ariadne marvels.

"It's very naughty to have a song about the devil set for your uncle's ringtone," Eames adds.

Arthur pretends to be checking his email. "So. Where exactly is it that you don't want to go because you're 'super-busy'?"

Tak stares at him sharply with narrowed eyes.

He blinks at her.

"I'm sure he'll be emailing you the details," she growls (she must be royally pissed, because her accent slips). "Is your awful pronunciation intentional, or do you just understand it far better than you speak it?"

Arthur snorts. "I can understand a lot of languages that I don't speak."

"Kuso wo tabete shine."

He smirks.

"I'm so jealous right now," Eames tells them with a pout.

"Don't be," says Arthur. "She talks like a boy. Very uncute."

"Kutabare," Tak says, stuffing her phone back into her bag and snatching up her sketch pad.

A pouting Tak is a very amusing novelty, and Arthur would enjoy it more if it weren't for the way she spills secrets as payback. As it is, she may decide to give something away for letting Eames and Ariadne know about her boyish Japanese.

He does indeed have an email from Saito, and it does include some very artfully insinuated details of a job. He'll have to think about it.

"You should get started for the day," he says. "Same drill as yesterday; Ariadne on the first level, Tak on the second. Do _not_ make changes—just verify the level and back out."

"You make Eames' subconscious sound like a big scary monster," snorts Ariadne.

"What makes you think it's not, dear?" Eames asks with a disarming grin.

"How long have you been in the extraction business?" asks Tak.

"Something like eight years."

"Mm-hm," she says. "Eight years to teach your mind how to detect, track, chase, and kill anything that gets in without permission. That, I believe, is the definition of 'big scary monster,' Ari."

Smart girl.

**.End.**


	16. Big in Japan

mmmm, flirtins. also? **warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). slightly slashy. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: pg-13 (for s***).

**pairing:** a little Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the morning after **Spilling Secrets** and **Boku**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) La Vie En Rose is another famous Edith Piaf song, notably featured in the Hepburn/Bogart flick Sabrina (i may have mentioned at some point that i have pretty much every Audrey Hepburn movie ever...i can't help it, the first English movie i ever watched was Sabrina). 2) "bright as a button" is a British idiom for "very smart." 3) "big in Japan" was a phrase used in the 70s to refer to music groups that enjoyed immense popularity in Japan, but much lower levels of popularity in the US and Europe (like the Scorpions). it's also an innuendo referring to penis size and the terrible slander that Japanese men are poorly endowed compared to caucasians. 4) a "little black book" is a private book of names and numbers. for the average person, it's a collection of booty calls. for those involved in the entertainment or hospitality industries, it would be full of celebrity names, movers and shakers, contacts who can provide anything from girls to food to drugs. for someone involved in organized crime, it would probably have a whole host of illegal associates. 5) "to baff something up" means "to mess something up." see also "to bollocks something up." 6) lots of fan-authors give Yusuf a sister. my version of his sister happens to be mysteriously similar to my own sister, with the exception that my sister is an artist/sculptor instead of a dream-chemist. oh, and my sister's blonde. 7) "bollocks" = "balls," "bullshit." 8) a sabbatical is an extended break from work or school, usually for spiritual purposes but also for health purposes. 9) "Tuesday" of course refers to **Apprentice**. 10) the Fibonacci sequence is a remarkable sequence of numbers where the next number is obtained by adding the previous two together; it occurs several times in nature, and is related to the Golden Ratio. there are several ways of calculating a higher order Fibonacci number besides adding together all the way up to it, and Arthur's using one based on the Cassini expansion; it involves picking a pair of known Fibonacci numbers (in this case the seventh and the sixth) and using their squares and cubes to find some high-level multiple (i'm saying this wrong, but what i mean is that if you start from the seventh, it's easy to find the fourteenth and twenty-first). the string of numbers is what runs through my pet mathematician's head when he's figuring Fibonacci numbers (it only takes him about three seconds to do one o_o).

* * *

><p><strong>Big in Japan<strong>

Arthur is careful today. He goes about his routine, phone tag be damned (this thing from Saito is more important, anyway). He is perfectly calm and pinned into place. He makes sure the coffee doesn't burn. He orders French toast (and preserves) for Eames' breakfast.

Tak has a morning class, so it'll be more than two hours before she gets to the hotel.

Eames is singing _La Vie En Rose_ as he wanders in; room service nearly runs over him as he lingers in the doorway.

Arthur holds out a fifty for the bellhop, who takes it with a gracious _thank you, sir_.

"French toast, how apropos, love."

"Is she ready?" Arthur asks bluntly.

"For which?" Eames asks in return. "Because they're certainly not ready to use synergistic architecture on an actual _job_, no matter how quickly they've taken to it. But she can forge, she can build…and she's bright enough to help extract." Eames waves his fork. "Bright as a button. She's _more_ than clever, Arthur. But you knew that, didn't you?"

Arthur allows himself a smug grin. "I told you she was brilliant. As I recall, you accused me of exaggeration."

Eames chuckles. "Well, you were practically gushing. No one forges on the second go."

"But she did."

"Mm."

Arthur takes quick stock of his resources.

A four-man team. Three architects, two forgers, three people with combat skills, two people with subconscious militarization, two incredibly stable dreamers, one incredibly unstable dreamer.

Their standard two levels. Find out who the mark's dating. Forge their way into a situation where they can lay hands on a list of names.

He considers how to pitch it, and how much information to give. "Job in Tokyo, pulling a name from the mind of some company heiress."

Eames' eyebrows rise. "This is the job for Saito."

"Yes," he confirms.

"A test of our training abilities?"

"Could be."

"Delightful. I'm quite big in Japan."

Arthur suppresses a sigh. "Ariadne will design the levels, we'll go two deep, I'll take the second layer. Try a forge that'll get us the girl's little black book."

Eames eats in silence for a moment. Then he shakes his head. "That's four, darling."

"I see you can count, Mr. Eames."

The forger waves his fork again. "No offense to Ariadne, but she'd be a rather shit lookout. We need a fifth."

"All she has to do is wake someone up if something goes wrong."

"And if armed security breaks down the door? She's far more use inside a dream, anyway."

Arthur frowns. "Okay, then Saito could provide—"

"—someone who has absolutely no idea what will help us and what will baff up the whole thing while we're under," Eames smoothly interrupts. "Will Yusuf be busy?"

"Yusuf would be a pretty shit lookout," Arthur remarks.

"Could ask his sister."

"Yusuf has a sister."

Eames nods. "Saja. Bloody Amazon. Once beat a man unconscious with a barstool. A capable, if uncreative, chemist in her own right…limited usefulness in actual dream-sharing, but she's properly informed and makes a very fine lookout."

Arthur adds that into his calculations. "Can we get her here within the next two days?"

"As long as we send Yusuf home to watch the cats."

"I notice you didn't suggest Cobb."

"You didn't, either," Eames retorts too quickly.

Arthur thinks about that while staring at his laptop. "No reason to involve him. And he's trying to retire."

"Bollocks," Eames pronounces with his mouth full.

"He needs to retire," Arthur amends.

"_Exactly_. Needs to, but he won't. So give him something of a sabbatical, right? Try and settle him back into the parenting thing. With any luck, he'll get so embroiled with it that the next time you offer a job, he'll only think twice for nostalgia's sake."

Contemplating the possibility, Arthur rubs a thumb over one of his cufflinks. "You don't really believe that," he decides after a while.

Eames laughs. "Of course I don't. On either side of legality, our work is far too fun to give up for the life of a suburban soccer parent. Still, let's give it a go for Phil and James."

Arthur notices quite suddenly that he's fidgeting and stops. He turns his hand and watches the diamond cufflink catch the sunlight and glow golden. He decides to break his rule about apologies. "I'm sorry," he says.

Behind him, Eames is perfectly silent. Several seconds later, he takes a drink and says, "Oh? About what?"

"Tuesday," he replies.

"You're not sorry. You don't know what you're sorry for."

"I _do_," he insists. "I'm sorry that you were upset. I'm sorry that my attempts at levity the next morning were so wildly unsuccessful."

"You're sorry that you upset me, is that what you mean? Because, quite honestly, the way you said it made it sound like it was _my_ fault."

Arthur considers that. "You're right," he concedes. "I'm sorry that I upset you. It was—I didn't like having you angry at me."

"Oh, I wasn't _angry_," Eames murmurs. "I was a lot of things, but angry wasn't one of them."

"Why did you buy me these cufflinks?"

Eames stands, approaches, leans forward and puts a hand on either side of Arthur's laptop, almost like an embrace. "Why have you been buying me breakfast?" he counters from quite close behind Arthur's ear.

Arthur feels a blush coming on. He quickly calculates the twenty-first to twenty-third Fibonacci numbers (based on the seventh) to avert it. "To my experience, Mr. Eames, buying you food or alcohol is the only way to keep you from wandering off."

Eames laughs.

Arthur doesn't dare turn, or even move. He loses track of a three somewhere in the twenty-fourth out of the seventh and starts over based on the sixth instead. Damn Cassini's expansions, anyway.

_169 128 297 104 30888 123552 64 338 402 64…_

"Darling, I'm sure you could come up with _all manner_ of ways to keep me from wandering off, if you truly set your pretty little mind to it," Eames muses. "Apology accepted." And he presses a kiss to Arthur's cheek.

_123552 77184 462…no, 463…shit._

"One of these days, I'm going to hit you for doing that," Arthur threatens, but fails to muster much sincerity.

Eames ambles unconcernedly back to his breakfast. "You've never yet."

Incorrigible bastard.

"Four-six-three-six-eight," Arthur mutters to himself.

"Fibonacci number twenty-four, isn't it? Darling, have you been distracting yourself during the entire conversation?"

"No!" he denies. Perhaps it comes out a trifle petulant, but having Eames (who professes to be awful at math) mysteriously identify a large Fibonacci out-of-context is not a nice surprise.

"And now you're wondering how I know that," Eames says smugly. "That, dear Arthur, is another of my many secrets. The next one's seventy-five thousand and twenty-five."

Arthur throws his pen.

Eames is—aggravatingly—able to laugh through the pain.

**.End.**


	17. Be Right Back

a little babysitter!Tak.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: g.

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the Monday two weeks after **Tak**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) Japanese meets French! this is actually a very effective way of teaching a multilingual child a new language. see glossary. 2) this is the way Moriarty tells fairytales. she'll give you the "proper" version, but she can't resist talking about all the broken laws and psychological malfunctions. she seriously once sat down and turned "the itsy-bitsy spider" into "the substantially minute masochistic arachnid" for the sake of properly educating her friend's baby. 3) Ashputtel is the German version of Cinderella. in it, the ugly stepsisters each managed to temporarily fool the prince by cutting off parts of their feet (it's a gold slipper, not a glass slipper), and the schmuck only found out they cheated because friendly birds told him. 4) somnophilia involves being aroused by intimately touching a sleeping person. 5) i've babysat kids who never wanted to stop playing outside, and i've babysat kids who never wanted to set foot outside...it mostly depended on whether they liked books. 6) forgot to explain the "hana," "which one?" thing—in Japanese, there are a LOT of homophones (words that sound alike), and "hana" can also mean "flower."

**Japanese-French glossary**  
>mimi = oreille = ear(s)<br>shita = tongue  
>hana = nez = nose<br>me = oeil = eye(s)  
>kuchi = bouche = mouth<p>

* * *

><p><strong>Be Right Back<strong>

Tak mops up spilled grape juice with one hand and holds out a plastic Hello Kitty lunchbox in the other. "_Mimi_," she says.

"How come I don't get a lunchbox?" James whines.

"Because you don't need one," Tak replies. "Now, if you're not going to learn, I'm going to stop teaching. _Mimi_."

"_Oreille_."

Phillipa comes barrelling into the kitchen, takes her lunchbox, and runs for the front door with a hurried, "ThanksbyeTak!"

"_Hana_," Tak says, holding out a travel mug full of coffee.

"Which one?"

"You've got more than one?" she gasps, poking him on the nose and throwing away the grape-stained paper towel.

He sticks his tongue out.

"That's _shita_. _Hana_."

"_Nez_," he finally answers, bored with being contrary.

Cobb bustles into the room, pulling on his jacket. "Where's—"

Tak passes him the coffee cup. "Waiting for you in the car. _Me_."

"_Oeil_," chirps James.

Cobb hugs his son with his free arm and kisses the little boy's forehead. "I'll be right back, okay? Be good for Tak."

"I will," James says obediently.

"Drive safe," Tak calls while Cobb hurries out the door. "_Kuchi_."

James makes a horrible face, pulling his lips wide with his index fingers and sticking out his tongue. "_Bouche_."

Sighing, Tak looks at him with narrowed eyes. "Haven't you heard that you might stick that way?"

"I won't," he dismisses. "Phillipa makes all kinds of dumb faces and she never stuck. Where were you last week when Dad had to pick up Phillipa from school?"

"I was at work."

"But I thought this was your work."

"What story do you want to read today?"

He jumps down from his chair and runs to the book shelf.

She watches him stare seriously at the spines of the books. "My uncle wants me to learn how to do what Arthur does. So Arthur's been teaching me."

James glances over his shoulder. "Uncle Arthur is Dad's best friend. Did you know that?"

"I did know that."

He settles on a book of fairytales. "Well, when he's not working, Uncle Arthur's really nice. I bet you didn't know **that**."

She smiles and follows him to the window seat. "No, I didn't know that."

"Hmmm. Read me the one about the bears. And tell it right, like you did with Snow White."

Once James is situated in her lap, holding the book open, she starts to read. As she goes, she runs her fingers under the words, helping to connect the printed letters with the sounds. She's sure to add her own running commentary about breaking and entering. She ends by reminding him that real bears don't sit in chairs or sleep in beds, and that they probably would have eaten Goldilocks.

He begs her for Sleeping Beauty, so she does that one, too. She mentions things like stalking, proper spinning wheel safety, somnophilia, and poor choices in gardening.

By the time he gets around to trying to make her tell him Ashputtel (he prefers the German version because it's bloodier), Cobb is home from driving his daughter to school.

"No," she says. "Two is plenty. Go do your letters—today is G, so I want five things that start with G. Green doesn't count."

And he scampers off to fetch crayons and paper.

"That is incredible," Cobb says. "He's never that good for me. The second you leave, he gets sulky and starts throwing tantrums."

"Funny, I never have a bit of trouble with him," Tak says. She doesn't mention that it's probably lingering resentment over the two years or so that Cobb was out of the country.

He sits at the table and works on his coffee. "So, how's it going? You've met the whole team now?"

"Yes," she says.

He waves a hand and raises his eyebrows. "And?"

She raises her eyebrows right back. "And Ari and I are working on synergistic architecture, Yusuf wants to introduce me to his cat, and Mr. Eames and I are best friends."

That seems to amuse him. He chuckles and shakes his head. "And how are you getting along with Arthur? I know he comes across as a little stiff sometimes, but it's only because he takes his job very seriously."

"Arthur…" She shrugs. "Arthur seems to have a love-hate relationship with the fact that I'm easy to teach. I think he finds me off-putting. We're in the middle of a minor feud, but that's really neither here nor there."

Cobb considers that. "If I asked him how your training is going, what do you think he'd say?"

Tak takes a seat at the table. "She's arrogant. She likes to break the rules. When she builds, she builds too heavily from memory and real spaces. She'll be handy in a fight. She could probably get away with forging a mark's own mother to him. I think she and Eames are teaming up to drive me slowly insane."

He laughs. "So you're going to be a forger?"

"I **am** a forger," she corrects. "Given the appropriate amount of observation, I'm probably among the top five."

He shakes his head. "Forging's hard; there's probably only about a dozen professional forgers in the world, four of them employed by governments. It's a tough market, and if you screw up a forge, you're the one most likely to end up hunted down."

"And Mr. Eames is the best," she concedes. "In fact, he's probably at least three of the best, because I don't imagine he works only under the name of Eames. But I forged on my second successful dream-share session, which from Arthur's reaction is more or less unheard of. And last Tuesday, I forged Arthur well enough to fool Mr. Eames, and if you're still not impressed, then you don't know Mr. Eames very well." Cobb stares at her over his coffee. He's too good to let surprise show blatantly, but she saw the momentary widening of his eyes. He takes a long drink. "And I think you know Mr. Eames better than most people do."

She looks over to make sure James is actually drawing instead of doing something else (he has a purple crayon that she thinks he might be trying to draw grapes with). "My uncle is sending us to Japan today."

Cobb spills some coffee down his front.

Sighing, Tak grabs a Shout wipe from her backpack and hands it to him. "Scrub it on both sides, or it won't wash out completely."

"Today?" he says. "And you couldn't have mentioned this earlier?"

She raises her eyebrows. "Arthur seemed to think you'd try to tag along if you knew in advance. We're going for work, after all; my uncle wants to see how well your team has trained me. Making us do a job in Japan is a great way of forcing me to help with the legwork."

"I'm done!" James calls from the living room, and scampers back to the dining table with picture in hand.

"Let's see," Tak says, taking it from him. "A nice big G…grapes…Godzilla…golf ball…goldfish…and that must be gorgonzola—nice blue spots."

James glows with pride.

"Do you know any other words that start with G? What about the place where you grow plants?"

"Garden!" he answers.

"And the noise dogs make when they're angry?"

"Grrrowl!"

"And the yellow stuff that pirates love?"

"Gold!"

"Very good," she praises, patting the little boy on the head. "Now you have to go outside and play for ten whole minutes—"

"Ten whole minutes?" he groans.

"Yes, ten whole minutes, but after that you can come back inside and have some juice and watch some television."

"Can't we read another story?"

Tak looks at him very seriously. "If I read all the stories to you, what will your daddy get to read to you?"

"Oh-**kay**," he relents, and runs out into the backyard.

Cobb is regarding her with an intense stare. "Who's going?"

She thinks telling him would only make him more likely to try to follow them; but Arthur never said to keep the team roster a secret, and maybe if he thinks she's in good hands, he'll leave it alone. "Arthur, Ari, Mr. Eames, and Yusuf's sister. And me, of course."

His expression remains frozen, and Tak realizes with a start that she can't read it. "Well," he says with a smile. "Good luck on your first job, then."

Tak doesn't trust that for a second. She smiles back. "Thank you."

**.End.**


	18. Simple Pleasures

777 words of jet-lagged Arthur loving his five star hotels. i, for one, become a complete space cadet when i'm jet-lagged.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). slight crack. brief appearances by OCs: Tak Shibuya and Saja. language: pg-13 (for f***).

**pairing:** slightly Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; just after getting off the plane the evening of **Be Right Back** (which is actually Tuesday, since they crossed the dateline).

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) Tak's birth-name is Miyako. 2) "I warshed me 'ands and face before I come" is a line from My Fair Lady. 3) the Wonderland watch has Bill the Lizard on the chain clip. XD 4) "it's Happy Hour"...the Japanese will actually drink all evening long, so it doesn't really matter if it's about 5pm. XD anyway, the flight from LA to Tokyo is 10 hours, and Tokyo is 17 hours ahead of LA...so they landed about 27 hours after they took off, lol. ah, the magic of time zones.

* * *

><p><strong>Simple Pleasures<strong>

Saito's men split them into two groups as they get off the private jet in Tokyo.

Tak is in a spectacular sulk, especially at being bowed to and addressed as 'Miyako-sama' (Arthur makes a mental note of the name).

Arthur is not surprised when the two cars drive them to the Imperial Hotel ('Bloody hell,' says Saja, who's never been to Tokyo and probably never stayed in a five star). After all, it's expensive, it's luxurious, and Saito surely knows it's one of Arthur's favorites.

Arthur is, however, surprised to be escorted straight up to a pair of full suites (one for the girls, one for him and Eames), where a handsome Japanese woman with an Australian accent points out the suite's features, explains the hotel's chief amenities, and outlines the daily meal schedule.

When Saito's men have deposited the luggage and politely taken their leave (accompanied by the hospitality staff), Arthur walks slowly to the nearest bed and falls down on it face-first. "Oh, my _God_," he groans. "It's beautiful. I think I love Saito. I'm going to write a sonnet about him and this fucking _exquisite_ suite."

"Keep calm, darling," chortles Eames. "Remember how expensive your trousers are."

"You don't understand," Arthur says. "They launder my suits _exactly_ the way I like. The coffee is always _perfect_. The sheets are _steamed_. The furniture is _obscenely comfortable_. Downstairs in this very hotel is one of the _world's greatest_ French restaurants. The only place in two hundred miles that surpasses this hotel in luxury accommodations is the Four Seasons, and their staff aren't as discreet. We could murder someone—literally _murder_ someone in this room, and only the police would ever know. Maybe not even them, if we call Saito in time."

He rubs his cheek happily against the duvet.

This, Arthur thinks, is something very like heaven. Something closer might include Eames naked. With peanut butter.

The forger, as usual, ruins it by speaking. "So you're going to write poetry to Saito because of the way they do your laundry and the fact they keep their mouths shut?"

Naked and _silent_. Very, very, _very_ silent. Made mute would be ideal, but gagged would be acceptable.

Arthur rolls onto his back and gesticulates expressively to the ceiling. "_Yes_, the way they do my laundry. It comes back perfectly pressed and smelling of enlightenment. You could use the pleat on a pair of slacks as a fucking _straight-edge_ after they're through with it. And if you ask, they'll hang everything _by color_. A glorious spectrum of dove grey through cappuccino, bubbling gently into neutral plaids and settling tranquilly into navy pinstripe, it's _fucking orgasmic_."

"You," Eames says firmly, "enjoy your clothing far more than is strictly sane."

"You," Arthur mocks with a contented sigh, "are a filthy, tasteless, color-blind, _walking fashion disaster_."

"Tut, tut. I am not filthy; I warshed me 'ands and face before I come."

Arthur sits up with a snort. "You and Tak and those _stupid_ Hepburn movies…"

"Do not cheapen our love of Audrey, darling, or I shall have to tie you to that bed and do unspeakable things to your suits. And Tak would help."

She would, the evil little thing.

So Arthur leaves the subject, stands up, hangs his jacket in the closet. "Well-executed laundry, Mr. Eames, is one of life's simple pleasures, right up there with honey peanut butter, dandelion puffs, and cashmere socks."

"I hardly think—"

"Cashmere. _Socks_," Arthur emphasizes carefully as he turns to regard the Brit.

Eames nods in a show of understanding. "Is that Bill the Lizard I spy at your buttonhole?" he asks knowingly.

Arthur passes his thumb over the watch chain that is indeed clipped to his waistcoat by a lizard with a ladder. "I can't very well wear my Cartier with these cufflinks."

"No, of course not," Eames demurrs. "Platinum with gold? What would the locals think?"

Arthur raises an eyebrow and checks the time, mentally adjusting for the difference in time zones. "It's Happy Hour, they'll think they're not drunk enough."

Eames laughs, and Arthur allows a gracious second thought about the 'silent' clause of his heaven scenario.

Then he allows himself to ponder how exactly Eames came by the Wonderland watch, and considers adding a 'handcuffed' clause, to keep the man out of trouble. Hm, yes. Handcuffed. To a bed. Naked, because that part's important.

He slips the watch back into his pocket. "Put the PASIV in the safe. I require Scotch, so I'm going to invite the girls to the bar for drinks to celebrate the miracle that is the Imperial Hotel. In the morning, we're back on the warpath."

**.End.**


	19. The Call

because it wouldn't be any fun if Arthur's life went according to plan.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OCs: Tak Shibuya and Saja. language: pg-13 (for f***, s***, and g**damn).

**pairing:** slightly Eames/Arthur.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; a few days after **Simple Pleasures**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) you knew Cobb was going to follow them. 2) heh. the weekly call from Mom first appeared in **Meeting**. 3) i imagine Arthur's mom as being one of those old money New England housewives. she's probably a widow, but i haven't decided yet. 4) Shelley is Arthur's sister, the mother of the nephew who named a goldfish after him. if you care, the nephew's name is Isaac. some fan-authors avoid OCs like the plague, but the world would be boring without all the little bit-parts filled in. 5) Nazareno Fonticoli was the master tailor who helped found Brioni. Eames is making a reference to the birth of Athena, who sprang fully-formed from the brow of Zeus. 6) "like Tak and Saito" is a reference to **Boku**. 7) Gildo (Ermenegildo) Zegna founded the Zegna fashion label. 8) Danaë was the mother of Perseus, whom Zeus begot on her in the form of a shower of gold. o_0 9) shinkansen = bullet train.

* * *

><p><strong>The Call<strong>

Cobb arrived in Tokyo the day after the team did. He pretended innocence ('Oh, Saito invited me over to see the unveiling of a new building for his company…'), but Arthur suspects he called Saito and more or less demanded to be allowed to hover over their shoulders for the duration of the job. Arthur deals with Cobb's presence by keeping him out of the loop and having Saito's men drag him around on luxury tourism pursuits.

Tak and Eames drift in and out of the hotel without warning; Arthur assumes it's for recon purposes. Eames has been pretending to be an Australian tourist (even speaks Japanese with the proper accent for it), Tak has been donning and shedding a million different skins (schoolgirl, office lady, three types of pop culture fashionista). They bring in more and better information than any of Arthur's local contacts (of which he has precious few).

Ariadne knows too little about the language to be comfortable helping them gather information, so she stays in the girls' suite, drawing mazes and building them into amazing models. Saja stands out too much and needs to stay anonymous to the mark, so she keeps the shut-ins company, occasionally dragging them away from their respective fixations for things like lunch and backgammon. It took forty-five minutes on the first day before she somehow talked Arthur into hauling himself, his phone, and his laptop into the other suite in the afternoons so they could all sit together—she has a subtle, cajoling way about her, in spite of the fact that she's nearly six feet tall and built like she could arm-wrestle Eames.

It's just after lunch on their third day in Tokyo.

Shortly before Cobb's arrival yesterday, Eames brought in a full file on the mark—her schedule, her habits, blueprints of the buildings where she spends most of her time (things that would usually be Arthur's responsibility, if he weren't being relentlessly stonewalled by chicken-shit contacts) and Tak brought in the bad news that the mark's secret bad-boy paramour is into drugs and dream-sharing (and both together). So the mark may be somewhat militarized, may be under the influence of hallucinogens if they take her at the wrong time, may be resistant to any sedatives they might try…

Arthur's sources can't get jack shit. The mark is from a very old and respected family, which in Japan means she's from a very private and possibly criminal family. Reputation still carries a lot of sway, and it seems like the mark's father has a reputation for making people disappear.

He's trying to decide whether to do a preliminary extraction on the boyfriend when his phone rings. He looks at the number and is confused for a moment before he remembers the dateline and groans.

"Hi, Mom," he says cheerfully, in spite of his annoyance. Knowing his luck, Tak will appear from the ceiling or something.

As it is, Ariadne peeks up over the top of her model and Saja turns down the television.

_~"Hi, sweetie! How's your week been?"~_

He tries to think what to say without lying.

"Uh…hectic. A couple of big projects. A lot of old friends coming and going. We're training someone as a favor to an important client."

_~"Oh, a new hire?"~_

"Sure. Yes. That's a great way to think of it." Arthur grimaces and guiltily thinks that he'd really like his mother to hang up before Tak or Eames (or _both_) gets back.

_~"So, big projects. Are you traveling right now? Oh, Goddammit…what time zone are you in, Art? I didn't call you at three in the fucking morning or something, did I?"~_

"No, it's fine, Mom, we're fourteen hours ahead of you." He doesn't add _I wish you wouldn't swear so much_, because that's one of those old arguments he doesn't feel like risking a re-hash of when Tak or Eames could burst in.

_~"Ooh, so it's tomorrow there. Y'know, Shell would make a joke about time travel right about now."~_

"Fortunately for the both of us, you have a more grounded sense of humor than Shelley."

_~"Well, I'm glad I didn't wake you up, at least, I know how you are, you never get enough sleep anyway, but I guess that's the curse of the well-appointed independent consultant, I just wish you'd think to take a little better care of yourself, Art, because you won't be young forever, and—"~_

Arthur rubs his forehead as his mother settles in for a long ramble (in fairness, she was in a hurry last week and had to run off for some kind of work emergency the week before, so she's been saving up).

Ten minutes later (after an update on work, the neighbors, her latest hobby, her new pool boy…), the girls have grabbed couch cushions and camped out beside the writing desk, watching raptly while Arthur mimes stabbing himself repeatedly with his pen.

_~"—been talking about getting married again, but for fuck's sake, what does she need with a man, I keep asking, but she tells me I'm being pushy and trying to hock some line of militant-feminism or some bullshit like that, but it's not like I'm telling her how to vote or some shit, you know, I'm just trying to make sure that she goes one-for-one on the perfect husband thing, aside from the pesky part where he got flattened by a drunk driver, but what can you do—"~_

He doesn't say _Mom, that's in terrible taste_, because she regards her point of view on Shelley's husband's death as 'pragmatic' rather than 'flippant.' He scribbles _please just kill me now_ on a complimentary hotel notepad and holds it up to the girls, who snicker softly behind their hands.

The door opens, and Arthur jerks upright.

"Darling, you wouldn't believe the traffic," Eames calls out, and Arthur wants to strangle him.

_~"Who was that? He sounds sexy, and he called you 'darling'—Art, are you _really_ working? And if this is what I think it is, why didn't you tell me you'd finally gotten another boyfriend? You've got much better taste in men than your sister, and—"~_

"IloveyouMombye," Arthur says quickly, and hangs up.

Saja and Ariadne immediately start giggling.

Eames, who is looking disarmingly young and attractive today, raises his eyebrows. "You have a mother? I thought you sprang fully-suited from the tailor's chalk of Nazareno Fonticoli."

"I hate you all," Arthur tells them, and throws his pen at Eames (who dodges).

"It was hilarious, Eames," Ariadne says. "It was like Tak and Saito. Arthur got in maybe a dozen words, and then he sat there and listened to her give the chronicle of her new pool boy and the suspicious way he looks at the gardener's ass. I honestly think she's unlocked the secret of talking without having to breathe."

"And she thinks you sound sexy, mate," Saja informs Eames.

"I do," Eames preens. "I shall have to ring her up sometime and properly introduce myself."

"No," growls Arthur. "You won't, because she doesn't know what I do for a living and I'm not going to try and explain you to someone who doesn't understand what forgers are like."

"And what are we forgers like?"

"Annoying button-pushing know-it-alls who delight in causing me immense suffering."

Eames pouts (which should not be cute on someone over the age of eight, but that's Eames for you). "And here I was looking forward to asking her what it was like, conceiving a child with Gildo Zegna's measuring tape like Danaë with the shower of gold."

That sets Ariadne off giggling again.

Arthur stands and primly straightens his clothing. He points at Eames. "You, go get run over by a shinkansen. And you," he goes on, pointing at Ariadne, "get back to work on that model before I throw you out the window."

**.End.**


	20. Harajuku Spy

a glimpse at a morning's recon with Tak.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OCs: Tak Shibuya and Saja. language: pg-13 (for f*** and s***).

**pairing:** teasing implications of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; perhaps the morning after **The Call**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) Harajuku is a part of Toukyou where young and fashionable people hang out. on the weekends, all kinds of different niche-culture groups start to show up. you will literally see thirty-year-old greasers standing next to fourteen-year-old ganguro, and if you start playing a popular para-para song, you'll draw an even weirder mix. 2) "SPR" = "Sex Pot Revenge," a very trendy Japanese punk fashion label. an SPR store is a lot like a cross between a Hot Topic and a Spencer's, but more expensive, and a lot of the clothes are very androgynous. 3) Osharei-Kei is a music/fashion movement in Japan that's characterized by bright colors and peppy, positive messages. it's kind of like extremely happy pop-rock dressed in mismatched punky clothes. An Cafe is an O-Kei band. 4) ganguro are those too-tanned, bleach-blonde, panda-eyed girls. they wear a lot of pink and look very silly. 5) para-para is...Japanese Eurobeat line dancing. that's really the only way to describe it. XD Gotcha! was a popular single by Domino. 6) an onnagata is a "female impersonator"—a highly skilled and devoted cross-dresser. Mana of Malice Mizer is an extremely famous onnagata-loli (a female impersonator who prefers gothic Lolita fashion); in fact, he more or less made the Japanese goth-loli trend. 7) V-Kei = Visual-Kei, a music/fashion movement in Japan that's characterized by black clothes, extravagant makeup, and dark themes. Dir En Grey is one of the great V-Kei bands, and they're an excellent example of the style. 8) "the cat" is, as always, a Breakfast at Tiffany's reference. when Tak says "Cat" or "the cat," she's talking about Eames.

* * *

><p><strong>Harajuku Spy<strong>

Tak hates Japan. Loves Japan. Hates Japan.

In Toukyou, anything you need to buy is under twenty minutes away by train, the crosswalks sing, there's a cop on every block. In Toukyou, she sticks out for being half-Euro, she blends in for being half-Japanese. In Toukyou, it's at least twice as easy for her to pass as a boy. In Toukyou, her uncle's men can hover and babysit and call her by her birth-name.

She's dressed head-to-toe in SPR, a charming little mockery of high fashion composed of carefully ripped electric blue stockings under tiny pinstripe shorts held up by checkered braces. The top is a tiny black button-down that dips low in the front and shows the La Perla balconet that matches the stockings. Calf-high black combats, blue makeup and wig, rhinestone-studded blue acrylic nails with half-inch tips.

The secrets of the universe can be found in the artful roll of her hips as she struts toward Harajuku (or so one might think from all the looks she gets for it).

This is where she first heard about the drugs the mark might be doing.

This is where she eavesdropped on the boyfriend enough to find out that he is: a) stupid, b) connected with a dream-chemist, and c) an aspiring extractor.

She rubs elbows with the others of her supposed ilk, admiring this boy's jeans, that girl's jacket. Like any good Osharei girl, she giggles at the greasers and makes faces at the ganguro girls. She pauses to do a round of para-para through the second chorus of Gotcha. She works her way through the crowds until she spots the mark's boyfriend.

Tak knows how to work this idiot.

She sways her ass past him to a pretty onnagata-loli and his wannabe-dangerous V-Kei friends. Christ, she's never seen so much black makeup in a twenty-foot square outside a mosh pit. One of the V-Kei boys flashes her a vampire grin, to which she responds with a derisively vulgar gesture before petting the sleeve of the closest boy and exclaiming over his 'badass shirt.'

Then she flutters her fake blue lashes at him and bluntly says she heard this was the place to go if somebody 'their age' (God, they're ten years younger than she is) wanted to get fucked up.

The mark's pet bad-boy comes up with a spring in his step and leans over her. His name is Makio, he says. 'His people' call him 'the dream king.' He deals in all kinds of 'fun shit,' provided a customer can pay in cash. He even sells a hallucinogen that keeps working when you fall asleep.

She looks intrigued and skeptical. She offers to buy 'a little of everything.' She reaches into her bra and pulls out some high-denomination bills.

He laughs. He doesn't keep the good stuff on him, that'd be dumb. He could get busted.

'So meet me somewhere else,' is what she rebuts. She'll even throw in a little extra appreciation.

Tonight. Eight-thirty. Some little hipster joint that plays American music.

She mingles a little more before heading back to the hotel. In their suite, Ariadne is working on her design for the second level ('Nice boots, Tak.') and Saja is watching bad game shows ('Love the wig, sweetheart.'). After she's back in jeans and a tee, she knocks on the door to the neighboring suite.

Arthur has a gun trained on her when she opens the door; she doesn't take offense.

"I have a meet with the mark's boyfriend tonight," she tells him. "He thinks he's tough stuff, so I'd like you somewhere close by in case I need to call for backup."

He holsters his gun. "What for?"

"I want to forge him to her on the first level."

"I've got some bad news. Your uncle's sent extractors after the boyfriend before—they bounced twice before they ran with their tails tucked between their legs."

She arches an eyebrow. "Bounced?"

"Were attacked and ejected by sub cons within moments of entering the dream," he explains. "He's been trained. The girl's probably had the same training."

"The boy didn't come across as someone who'd been trained to that kind of extent, but he deals in drugs that affect dreaming."

Arthur rubs his chin. "In theory, there could be drugs that enhance militarization, but they'd have nasty side-effects. Talk to Saja, have her call Yusuf."

She looks around the suite. One of the beds hasn't been slept in. "Have you seen the cat today?"

"No," he grunts. "And if he knows what's good for him, I _won't_."

"Don't you think you're overreacting?"

He glares at her. "My mother is going to spend the next six months assuming I have a British boyfriend who apparently sounds sexy. Nothing I say to the contrary is going to get through to her."

"'Apparently'?" She grins. "So _you_ don't find his voice sexy in the least? That low, smoky timbre that would just _curl_ its way around all the filthiest bedroom phrases? You aren't in the least bit intrigued by the idea of him telling you he'd like to lick every inch of you, or that he'd like you to tie him up and punish him for being a bad, bad boy, or—"

"Oh, my _God_!" Arthur yells, and throws his pen at her.

She cackles as she dodges—his ears are pink.

**.End.**


	21. White Rabbit

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). minor slash leanings. taking liberties with when/how the characters met and how long they've known each other. OC: Tak Shibuya (not a Mary-Sue). language: pg (for one use of ass).

**pairing:** some gentle background Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; probably a month or so after Arthur meets Tak.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) the Wonderland watch is like Tak: it dropped fully-formed into my brain with no explanation and no excuse. jeweling is the practice of making certain high-wear parts of a watch's workings out of gems (because of their hardness compared to metal); a twenty-three-jewel watch has twenty-three such pieces inside (the standard is seventeen). a double-face watch is designed to open easily both in the front and in the back. a skeleton watch has visible workings. a chronometer is a watch that has been certified to a high standard of accuracy (actually, in America you can call all sorts of sloppy watches chronometers—but the rest of the world only uses the term for actual Swiss-certified chronometers). the images engraved on the Wonderland watch are all classic Tenniel illustrations from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 2) "three days slow" is something the Mad Hatter accuses the White Rabbit's watch of being in the original Disney animated feature (in the book, he declares his own watch to be "two days wrong"). 3) "hour and seven minutes" is a math reference. 67 (as in minutes) is a very special prime number. it's an irregular prime, a lucky prime, a Pillai prime, and a Heegner number. you can google all that junk. suffice it to say 67 is a very special number. 4) the Chronophage (time-eater) is the escapement insect on the Corpus Clock at Cambridge University. the clock does some very odd things, including slowing down for periods and then rushing to catch up. it's only truly accurate every five minutes. you can google that one, too. 5) again, "Cat" and "Miss Golightly" are references to the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. when Tak says "Cat" she means Eames.

* * *

><p><strong>White Rabbit<strong>

Arthur does not fidget; it's an unbecoming habit, and it gives away too much about a person.

Instead, Arthur either clenches his hand around his totem, hidden safely in his pocket, or he obsessively checks the time.

These days, if he is wearing the right suit for it, he checks the time by dipping his hand into his waistcoat pocket and pulling out the Wonderland watch.

The Wonderland watch is a twenty-three-jewel double-face skeleton chronometer pocket watch with an engraving of the Mad Hatter's tea party on the front and the weeping Gryphon and Mock-Turtle on the rear. Every half hour, the Cheshire Cat's smile rotates into visibility among the cogs.

Like many of the most pointless and whimsical (and perfectly wonderful) things in Arthur's life, the Wonderland watch entered by way of Eames, left in his mailbox in the downstairs lobby of his apartment building in Los Angeles. The only indication of its sender is the inscription on the inside of the front face: _For Darling Arthur_.

It's almost impossible to read the Wonderland watch without knowing its secrets (Arthur often wonders what sort of demented masochistic clock-maker would design such a thing, let alone be able to certify that its accuracy is high enough to earn the official classification of chronometer), but Arthur enjoys the extra challenge involved. As a bonus, there aren't many people in the world who would be able to fake it in a dream, so it makes a good secondary totem.

First, its face has thirteen numbers, which are drooping, shuffled, or fallen to the bottom (where the Caterpillar contentedly smokes among them). The only number in its 'proper' place is the thirteen, at the very top.

Second, its action and gears were all painstakingly made and assembled to run backward, so a flamingo croquet mallet chases a hedgehog ball counter-clockwise around the face.

Third, it only ticks three of every five seconds, like a staggering heartbeat (an oddly lulling, peaceful noise…_tik tik_…_tok_…_tik tik_…_tok_…). Whether this is a noise created for effect or has something to do with a cleverly shaped cogwheel, Arthur has no idea.

Fourth, it has a small calendar complication at the bottom that is, in fact, three days slow (Arthur knows how to reset it, but that's not the point).

Fifth, the dial of the watch is exactly one hour and seven minutes fast compared to Pacific Standard (this too could be reset, but again that's not the point).

These are all the secrets he's found so far, and it's enough to let him tell the time except under very odd circumstances (the Wonderland watch has stopped six times that he knows of, but always returned to the proper time [plus an hour and seven minutes] shortly thereafter).

So when he draws it from his pocket and deftly flicks it open, he can see (with some minor mental acrobatics) that Tak is almost twenty minutes late.

Someone trots up to where he waits under the bright rainbow lights of Yokohama.

"Okay, okay, how late am I?" Tak asks, pausing in front of him to adjust a fishnet stocking in a most unladylike manner.

He closes the watch and looks up. Before he can reply, he finds himself gawking at her.

Tak looks _very_ different in a tiny dress and knee-high platform boots. The neon makeup around her eyes makes them look huge. She's confident and dangerous in a way quite unlike her normal understated self. It strikes Arthur as odd that she seems to feel so safe dressed like that at night in the middle of a big city. Forgers, it seems, find the world more comfortable from behind a mask.

"Oh, _shut up_," she says defensively, even though he hasn't spoken. "I had to dance with the creep for half an hour before I managed to pick his stupid pocket. Wasn't even an ass worth groping…"

Arthur clears his throat. "Twenty minutes," he says in answer to her first question. "I hope you have what you need for the forgery."

"That and more—I have a sample of the drug they were using to enhance subconscious militarization."

"Yusuf will faint with glee."

She rolls her eyes. "Chemistry nerds… How can you even tell time on that crazy thing? Doesn't it play tricks, like the Chronophage?"

Absently, Arthur opens the Wonderland watch again and checks it. The hands are in the wrong place, but quickly twirl into position like students caught out of their seats when the teacher returns. "Hm," he says. "It's nine fifty-one. Almost fifty-two."

Tak pulls her cell phone out of her cleavage (_Do women really do that?_ Arthur thinks incredulously) and looks at it. "Huh. Show-off," she says, and her accent changes (no longer that nondescript American, now something like British-educated European). "I _told_ Cat you'd be insufferable once you figured out how to read it, but he said something about that being half the fun."

He snaps the watch shut. "I am _not_ insufferable, Miss Golightly."

"Ohoho," she scoffs, back to her usual accent. "Let's go. I'm starved, and it's Mr. Cobb's turn to buy dinner."

**.End.**


	22. Preliminary

the preliminary extraction. because it's not like Tak wouldn't have noticed Artie showing up during that synergistic architecture session.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OCs: Tak Shibuya. language: pg-13 (for f*** and s***).

**pairing:** a hint of Eames/Arthur sentiment.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the day after **Harajuku Spy** and **White Rabbit**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) Yokohamaaaaaa. technically, Yokohama is like a suburb of Toukyou. it's where i grew up. on the bay, there's a lot of tourist and leisure stuff, including a very photogenic (and pretty famous by now) ferris wheel. 2) as always, "Cat" is a reference to "Breakfast at Tiffany's." 3) "utenaide" = "(please) don't shoot." 4) and now we know that the mark's name is Hanako. 5) "sort it out" = "take care of it." 6) "live-o" = "quickly."

* * *

><p><strong>Preliminary<strong>

It's almost criminally easy to get the mark's boyfriend alone on their second 'date,' and even easier to slip him a roofie. After that, all Tak has to do is let Arthur and Eames in through the back door.

Arthur stands guard while Tak and Eames go under.

She goes prepared for violence, has them dressed in tactical gear.

The place should be a loose approximation of Yokohama (they can see the ferris wheel in the distance), but it's obscured by the noise and fire of a riot.

"This is the drugs, yeah?" Eames asks.

"Yeah, he took something before I got here."

"Nice. He's found something that makes the sub cons into a screaming batch of incoherent apes. I can already see we'll get loads of information out of them."

She looks at him (he's grinning). "This is enough like Yokohama that he'll have populated his drug stash. There'll be something there. And even if it's useless, we'll have logged some experience against these drugs of his."

"How fun."

"You're not _scared_, are you, Cat?" she teases.

He shrugs. "If darling Arthur is to be believed, I'm not intelligent enough to have a sense of fear."

She smiles and jerks her thumb toward the club where she'd met Makio. "Let's go."

Whatever the drug is, it doesn't seem to make the sub cons especially coordinated or attentive—just violent. They manage to sneak their way into the back of the club without incident. Their first real trouble comes as they're working through the VIP rooms: a guy with a machine pistol, a few girls with knives, but they go down pretty quickly.

Just as they reach the door to Makio's room, Tak gets a bad feeling and yanks Eames to one side in time to dodge a hail of gunfire.

"You _missed_," sighs someone with Arthur's voice. "I even told you they were coming and you _missed_. Why am I surrounded by useless people?"

"Shit," mutters Eames.

"Is there something you'd like to _tell_ me, Cat?" Tak hisses, anger making her accent slip. "Because the _real_ Arthur is guarding our sleeping bodies and that is sure as hell not _my_ stray projection in there."

"Never you mind, just kill it and disarm the boyfriend so we can get to his stash."

"This is a problem," she insists, blocking him from going into the room. "If you've got strays leaking out, you can't know the layouts."

"Can we talk about this _later_, please?"

She punches him in the arm. "I know you, Mr. Eames; when you say _later_ you mean _never_. But I promise you I will tell Arthur if you don't give me a damn good reason not to before we wake up. For now, just take me hostage."

Tak didn't want to use this forge if she didn't have to—it's imperfect. But she forges the mark with mussed hair and a torn dress, drops her rifle and takes Eames' sidearm, which she holds behind her back.

"Utenaide!" she cries, and lets Eames shove her into the room.

"Hanako!" Makio says, lowering his gun.

"Oh, you _idiot_," mutters the projection of Arthur, stealing the gun from Makio just as Tak shoots him in the head.

Makio tries to fight, but Tak puts him down with a bullet to the knee and a kick to the face.

"So." Tak toes the stray projection onto its back. "What the fuck is this doing in here? It's the same one that was in the classroom level the other day."

"Yes," Eames says, even though she wasn't asking. "Doesn't matter, I'm handling it."

"Handling it so well it told the subject we were coming? If this thing follows us onto the _real_ job, it won't matter how good our levels are or how well we forge. If this were _just_ a stray projection, I'd let you go on keeping it a secret…but this thing tried to fuck us over, and I'm not bouncing on my first job because you have _unresolved issues_ with our point man."

He clings to sullen silence for a while, so she lets him.

In the stash, she finds details about the chemist and a few tidbits about the mark. Nothing particularly useful, but every little bit helps. Arthur will add it to his collection and have that much clearer an idea of how he thinks they should do the job.

She forces herself to calm down, to observe.

Eames looks badly shaken, angry at himself.

Sighing, she shoots Makio in the other knee to make sure he stays down, then tugs Eames onto a nearby couch to sit. "What are we going to do about it? Worst-case scenario: it finds the information before we can and destroys it. Next-worst: it bounces us until we give up."

"I honestly have never had to deal with this kind of thing before," he admits.

"Well, we can _try_ confining it inside your subconscious. Tell Arthur I'm teaching you to forge Makio, go into your subconscious, lock the bastard up somewhere. I've never tried it on someone else, though… It'll get out eventually."

"No doubt."

She nudges him. "It's a projection of _Arthur_. So that's where the problem is. You need to resolve whatever-it-is _fast_."

He rubs his eyes. "It's not. The problem, I mean. It's not with Arthur—or _just_ with Arthur, anyway."

"Well, _talk_ to him. The way you two dance around each other is maddening. Why can't you just sit down somewhere like a pair of rational adults and talk about what's going on between you?"

"All that happens when we talk is that he gets more annoyed with me."

Tak throws her hands in the air. "Oh, for God's sake…men are such _babies_. I swear, after this job is done I'm going to buy each of you a drink, have a nice long chat with him _myself_, and then lock the two of you in a closet until either the moaning stops or I get bored listening to you insult each other."

Eames makes a hysterical little noise.

"Relationship jokes aside, this is deadly serious, Cat. Let me put it in terms you can understand," she says, and goes on in a thick Cockney accent, "Sort it out live-o, or I'll resort to drastic measures."

"Not every Brit is Cockney, madam," he says with a raised eyebrow.

She thumps him in the chest with his own sidearm. "_Please_. You think I can't spot a London boy a mile off? We have what we came for, so let's go."

He stops her with a hand on her wrist. "Be careful…when we go back under."

"I can take care of myself, Mr. Eames," she assures him.

**.End.**


	23. Feigning Blindness

for all that he was having emotional issues and some mild freak-outs during the movie, i think Cobb must be a talented confidence man, very good at reading the reactions of others very quickly and stealthily.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OCs: Tak Shibuya, Saja. taking liberties with how the characters met/how long they've known each other. language: pg (primetime tv).

**pairing:** fuzzy Eames/Arthur undertones with bonus Yusuf/Ariadne undertones.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; recounting the week in Japan through Cobb's eyes. ends later in the same day as **Chaining the Serpent**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) the "unspeakable embarrassment" occurred in **The Call**. 2) the preliminary extraction on the mark's boyfriend took place in **Preliminary** (**Papillon**). 3) Les Saisons is the French restaurant at the Imperial Hotel Tokyo. 4) "mate" is British for "friend." 5) Mal & Eames at school happened back in **Miss Miles** (**Papillon**). 6) Kobe beef is widely considered the best beef in the world. it's VERY expensive. 7) tarte tatin is a kind of upside-down fruit tart. crème brûlée is a caramel-topped custard. gateau mocha (gateau moka) is a coffee-and-chocolate-flavored cake. 8) "barmy" is British for "nuts/crazy." 9) "right as a trivet" is a British idiom for "perfectly fine/healthy." like "right as rain" or "fit as a fiddle." 10) surely you know that yakuza are the Japanese equivalent of the mafia. 11) in point of fact, Confucius little to say on the subject of inductive reasoning. it was first Pyrrho (3rd-4th cent BCE) and then Hume (18th cent CE) who complained that past occurrences cannot be guaranteed to accurately predict the future. Eames is citing one of the more famous arguments, "just because a rock has fallen down every time you dropped it in the past does not mean that it will fall down every time that you drop it in the future." the basic idea is that we cannot know what interfering factors may be introduced in the future, or that our current knowledge is complete.

* * *

><p><strong>Feigning Blindness<strong>

Dom is good at feigning blindness. The less attention you appear to be paying, the more likely people will spill their secrets without you having to lift a finger. It's also a good way to let others cling to their pride.

But _pretending_ not to notice is very different from _actually_ not noticing. The whole reason Dom called Saito and came to Japan was to make sure he'd notice things. He doesn't know Saja, and he isn't sure he believes Arthur and Eames can look after Ariadne and Tak at the same time.

Dom spends the first day letting himself be passed off to Saito's people, relaxing and seeing the sights. He proposes they have their dinners together, to help strengthen the team rapport—he insists on taking a turn to buy, despite Arthur's suspicious frown, and he knows Tak will back him up because of their shared taste in food.

For the next two days, he's ushered out from underfoot before he can even leave his hotel room (Saito has put him up in the Four Seasons). On his fourth day in Japan, he buys dinner for the team and uses the chance to see how they're getting along.

Ariadne and Saja are apparently partners in crime, which is somewhat comical because of their mismatched sizes. They seem to have borne witness to some unspeakable embarrassment on Arthur's part (the point man threatened to dock their pay if they mentioned it) that has them giggling to themselves.

Saja acts quite familiar around Eames (calls him 'Sean' like Mal used to, touches his arm, shows a teasing little half-grin). When Dom delicately asks whether they've dated, she throws her head back and laughs. When Tak uses Dom's exact phrasing to ask if Eames dated Yusuf, he loudly laments that 'unfortunately, dear Yusuf is straight and rather fancies a certain adorable little architect' (Ariadne blushes a very sweet shade of pink). It's the first real confirmation Dom has gotten that Eames is, as Mal always claimed, _not_ straight.

It looks like everyone's getting along. That's good—it means they're less likely to second-guess one another.

Dom tries to subtly see where they are with the job. Arthur gives him silence. Eames gives him jokes. Tak and Saja change the subject. But Ariadne lets it slip that they've got a preliminary extraction planned for tomorrow (Arthur shoots her a dirty look).

"That's great," Dom says. "Then we can all have dinner together the next day and Tak can tell me all about her first extraction."

The girls approve very vocally. Arthur disapproves very silently (Dom pointedly pretends not to notice).

So Dom bides his time through the fifth day (picks up some real souvenirs for the kids), arranges reservations at Les Saisons to help soothe Arthur's ruffled feathers.

At seven thirty on the sixth day, he waits at their table, sipping sweet iced tea.

Then he has to pretend not to notice the flaws in the Eames character, in his always-perfect mask (a slightly disconnected look in Eames' eyes, the high loft of his head, the careless asymmetrical turn of his shoulders). Arthur looks annoyed. Tak's face is carefully blank. Ariadne and Saja act like everything's fine (maybe it is, as far as they know).

Arthur is definitely sulking about something—he orders the truffle pastry for his appetizer and eats it with aggressive little stabs of his fork, eyebrows knit all the while. (For his part, Dom has never really seen the appeal of truffles. They're just funny-tasting mushrooms, but Arthur and Mal called him a barbarian last time he said so.)

Tak fills the silence with praise of Ariadne's little throw-together level design, off-hand comments about the mark's boyfriend, and a thorough investigation of what Dom's been up to (seeing the sights, tasting the foods, experiencing the culture in a way he was never able to when he was working).

Dom pretends not to notice the way Saja uses Tak's chatter to ask Eames a question behind her napkin, and he _certainly_ pretends he can't hear just what that question is.

"Sean, are you _high_, mate?" she demands in a whisper.

Tak hears it, glances toward Eames under cover of a blink, twitches her mouth a little.

"Not unless you've been slipping things into my food, dear," Eames blithely replies after a half-second pause.

"Then you must be coming down with something. There's not much else causes those symptoms."

Dom chews his salad. If Saja's a dream-chemist, she knows as well as he does that one potential cause for that kind of fever-like set of symptoms (unfocused eyes, lagged responses, lapses in fine control) is encapsulation. He wonders what could bother a man like Eames enough to undergo encapsulation in the middle of a job, but for now he'll give the forger the benefit of the doubt.

"Eames, you look a little out of it," he says. "Traveling and working odd hours can wreak havoc on the immune system, you know."

"I am _truly_ touched by everyone's concern," chuckles Eames, "but I assure you, a little more sleep will see me entirely mended."

Now that Dom has drawn attention to Eames, even Ariadne notices. "Maybe you should stay in tomorrow, just in case," she suggests.

Eames turns his drowsy gaze on Arthur and grins. "What do you think, darling? Could you spend a whole day with me lazing about the room and not end up killing me?"

"No," Arthur replies. "Which is why I'll be working in the girls' suite all day tomorrow."

"_Cold_," Eames tsks with an exaggerated pout.

Tak is oddly quiet, almost as if she doesn't know what she can safely say. Her face is frozen into the kind of meditative blankness Dom has come to expect of an experienced con artist caught by surprise in front of a skilled audience.

"Well, just make sure you rest up," Ariadne frets. "We don't want you catching something right before the actual job."

For a moment, all Eames does is blink lethargically. Then he waves a hand with another drunken-sounding chuckle. "Really, precious. I can honestly say that I have no recollection of anything whatsoever that would give me any trouble on the job."

Dom narrows his gaze at the forger, scrutinizing him.

Delay. Amusement. Careful wording.

It's just like Eames to tease and hint during the scatterbrained period of recovery after an encapsulation. The sudden euphoria of being rid of some mental burden, however temporarily, has a tendency to make people reckless. It's why Dom never did it again after the first experimental foray. That, and the finicky way that even the best encapsulation can be unraveled by a word, a smell, a color…

But it's Eames' business, not Dom's. And as long as nothing goes wrong when they go in to fetch the mark's little black book, it'll stay that way.

Now it's just a matter of mild caution, and of curiosity, so Dom allows his mind to play with the challenge of it. It must have been done today for Eames to still be recovering. Either Arthur knows and disapproves, or doesn't know and is annoyed that something's being kept from him. Tak clearly knows something; Saja and Ariadne just as clearly know nothing. What could it be?

_What are you hiding, Eames?_

_You'd tell Mal_, he thinks with a dull pang. He remembers them back in their school days, huddled like conspirators, like twins, sharing secrets while they waited for him to show up and take Mal on a date.

It's possible that Dom's willingness to grant Eames enormous amounts of leeway in most situations goes back to that—to the idea that he has deprived this canny liar of the only person he ever trusted.

"Cobb? Cobb," says Ariadne, jostling his elbow.

"Just thinking of home," he tells her, and smiles.

Their meals arrive (Arthur ordered beef, of course, and with that kind of price tag, it had damn well better be the best-tasting cow in all of Kobe), and the mystery is swept aside for later.

After he pays the check, he stands and gestures to the door. "Mr. Eames, you should be getting to bed. I'll walk you up, tell you how the kids are doing."

Arthur and the girls are still eating their desserts (tarte tatin, crème brûlée, gateau mocha, all of it being snitched and shared), so no one tries to stop them or accompany them.

In the elevator, Dom raises his eyebrows. "So. Encapsulation."

Eames smiles (broad and genuine). "Miles and I did it all the time, Cobb, I know the after-care. It's like a scab. Ignore it, don't poke at it, keep your nose out of dangerous places, don't tell the worrywarts…"

Dom doesn't know what Mal might have needed to encapsulate. No, that's not true. The easiest way to sell a con is to believe it wholeheartedly. Mal might have needed to temporarily block out a hundred things for perfectly honest reasons. If it were something bad, Eames wouldn't be wearing that honest smile, all crinkled eyes and crooked teeth—it would be a face of contempt, a wry little grin ('Hah, look what your wife told me that she wouldn't tell you.'), that same old face of _she was _my_ family long before she was _yours.

Dom shrugs. "Well, I hope it was worth pissing off your point man."

"_My_ point man," Eames scoffs, but is still clearly amused. "Dear Mr. Clarke is only sulking because there's something he doesn't know and I won't tell him. It must be driving him positively _barmy_." And there's the reason for Eames' enjoyment.

Dom tips his head in acknowledgment. "Like you said, he's a worrier. He doesn't like not knowing what's wrong with you."

"A factor for which he cannot account," drawls Eames. "You and I both know I'll be right as a trivet…after a little more sleep, anyway. What are the odds of me ending up on the inside of a structure I would consider secure enough to hold one of my secrets, hm?"

"You know I don't play the odds, Eames," Dom chuckles.

"It's a routine extraction."

"There's no such thing as a 'routine extraction.' There's just extractions without surprises and extractions _with_ surprises. With Arthur's thoroughness, the latter are very infrequent for us, but the Fischer job showed that we're still vulnerable."

Eames gestures vaguely with one arm. "Yeah, but she's just this little society heiress, at worst some sheltered yakuza daughter who likes a bit of the rough life. She will _not_ have the right kind of mind to force _my_ secrets out."

"You say that with such conviction," Dom notes. "But that's just because nobody has before. There's always a first time."

Eames laughs and saunters out of the elevator and down the hall. "And next time I drop the rock, it may fall _up_, eh, Confucius? Aside from Miss Tak, who has rather a talent for it, only two people in all the world have ever known or guessed my secrets—and they didn't do it by force."

_Mal._

Dom sticks his hand out to keep the elevator doors open for a moment longer. "Who's the second?"

"My mother, of course."

**.End.**


	24. In Sheep's Clothing

because Tabitha-Kittywitch on deviantART asked for crossdressing!Arthur.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OCs: Tak Shibuya, Saja. taking liberties with how the characters met/how long they've known each other. cross-dressing. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus t*ts).

**pairing:** none/gen (with minor reference to Eames/Arthur leanings).

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the day after **Feigning Blindness**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) i love L'Arc~en~Ciel. 2) the tradition of the onnagata goes back to classical Japanese theater, where women weren't allowed to act. the professional onnagata trains strenuously to master graceful movement. certain very famous onnagata are amazing to watch on stage; they're more graceful than a prima ballerina. amateur onnagata tend to emphasize cuteness over grace, though—a lot of them are into goth-loli. 3) it's true, most male cross-dressers are heterosexual. 4) in this context "frou-frous" are frilly bloomers. (the term "froufrou" means "frilly/elaborate.") 5) Mary-Janes are schoolgirl-style black shoes with a strap across the top. 6) as always, "the cat" and "Miss Golightly" are references to the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's." 7) nitrile is a latex-substitute that's seeing increasing use in the manufacture of rubber gloves. 8) curry is very popular in Japan, and lamb is seeing a rise in popularity due to beef shortages. 9) Tak allegedly teaching Eames to forge the mark's boyfriend happened in **Chaining the Serpent** (**Papillon**).

* * *

><p><strong>In Sheep's Clothing<strong>

Tak hummed the latest L'Arc single as she negotiated her way through the door with her packages.

Arthur barely glanced up from his laptop. Saja was doing something complicated and chemical that involved beakers, burners, and goggles.

"That doesn't look like your size," Arthur commented.

"That's because it's not," Tak happily confirmed, setting down some bags and admiring the dress in the clear garment bag.

"Then who's it for?"

"You."

When the point man turned to glare at her, she couldn't help grinning. "You have _got_ to be—you're not kidding."

She shook her head. "I'm not kidding. You want more info from Makio and Hanako's chemist, you'll have to go to the source. He doesn't trust most men or real women, only onnagata. The cat is under orders to spend the day resting, and he's too bulky around the shoulders to find something for him on short notice, anyway."

Arthur's cheeks turned pink. "I'm not dressing up like some—"

"Some professional actor who knows more about grace and elegance than a real woman?" she countered. "The onnagata has a very rich and respected cultural history, thank you."

"Eames put you up to this, didn't he?" growled Arthur.

She rolled her eyes at him. "I promise you, a great many things you find unpleasant are _not_ the result of careful planning by the cat."

"Oh, and I'm sure he would never pay you to get pictures if I _did_ happen to—"

"'Scuse me!" Saja called irritably. "Can you lot keep it down? I'm trying to titrate over here!"

Tak raised her eyebrows at Arthur. "It's just another con, Arthur. It's just a role. It's not about wearing a dress, or being eccentric. It's about grace and beauty. A lot of onnagata find it emphasizes their masculinity when they change back. All you have to do is be pretty and quiet and interested. They won't be talking about things like—like BDSM clubs, or their taste in men. The worst they'll get is shoes, makeup, wig care…"

"I have no desire to put on women's clothing and make a spectacle of myself," he insisted.

"You know," Tak said with a snort, "it speaks very poorly of your psychological well-being that an otherwise-secure bisexual man would find his masculinity threatened by a little thing like wearing a dress around a bunch of other men wearing dresses, most of whom are straight."

That flustered Arthur; she could tell by his sudden thin frown.

She put on her most composed, matter-of-fact face. "Now. Your eyes really call for an autumn palette, so I picked up this delightful pseudo-Victorian in diagonal plaids. I wavered on black stockings or white for a while, and I decided white would be better for the colored frou-frous and the black Mary-Janes. I assumed you'd throw a tantrum if I brought you heels, so I passed over this _adorable_ set of pumps…"

"Tell me you're not sending me out all on my own to do this," Arthur said, perhaps a little anxiously.

"You can't handle nodding and smiling, and maybe picking some pockets?" she asked with mock-surprise.

"I'm not that kind of thief, Miss Golightly," he retorted sourly.

"Relax, I was just teasing. I'll go with you as your cousin. You're visiting Japan and I decided to show you a subculture that would accept your hobby. We'll pretend your Japanese is mediocre. I'll do the pickpocketing, if necessary."

He raised his eyebrows. "A surprisingly well-thought-out plan."

Tak countered with a deferent nod. "I thrive on impressing unimaginative gentlemen such as yourself. Let's get you into costume. Let me know if you have trouble figuring out how to put anything on. I'll come in and do your hair and makeup once you're dressed."

When Arthur was safely locked in the bathroom with all the various accoutrements of his disguise, Tak started slipping into her own outfit.

"My gratuitous nudity sense is tingling," Saja said without turning. "You do realize Sean could come flouncing in at any moment?"

"Am I meant to care if a gay man with a raging crush on Arthur sees my tits?" Tak grunted while she ditched her bra for a compression top.

Just then, Ariadne came back with lunch. "What'd you guys do with Arthur?" she asked.

"He's slippin' into something more ladylike," Saja chuckled. Then she sighed. "My life would be so much easier if I could afford a portable mass spectrometer."

"Yeah, mine too," Ariadne hazarded.

"It's a machine that identifies the chemical components of a sample," Tak told her helpfully.

"Cool. Are you safe to eat without washing your hands, then?"

"That's what gloves are for, love," said Saja, peeling her way out of a pair of nitriles and putting her goggles onto her forehead.

Ariadne started unpacking the take-away bags. "So you're going as a boy again?" she asked.

"It's only fair," Tak said with a grin.

"You keep having fun with it and he's never going to come out of there," Saja warned her.

"Please," scoffed Tak. "If he tried to barricade himself and refused to come out, I'd just resort to underhanded things like having the cat serenade him through the door until he relented for the sake of his bleeding eardrums."

Ariadne tapped the plastic lid of one steaming cardboard bowl. "Spicy lamb with white rice."

"And mine?" asked Saja, inspecting the other bowls.

Ariadne tapped a different one. "Extra spicy chicken with brown rice. And there's Arthur's mild lamb with brown."

Tak went and knocked on the bathroom door. "Arthur, if you want to eat, you can cover up with a towel and chow down while I do my makeup. Don't worry, I'll bring your curry to you so you don't have to wander out here half-dressed."

"Bolt the door first, please, or I may be forced to murder Mr. Eames."

Grinning, she bolted the front door of the suite before fetching Arthur's curry. When she knocked again and ducked into the bathroom, she was slightly surprised to see that Arthur had managed to get completely dressed on his own. "Hm," she said. "I was so sure you'd need a hand with the zipper. Or the collar. Or the garters. Or—"

"Thank you, Tak, I have a number of skills not mentioned in my résumé, including dressing myself in obscure clothing and costumery. It's really no worse than a haz-mat suit."

She waved a finger toward his legs. "I didn't think haz-mat suits included garters and thigh-highs."

The glare he aimed at her could have curdled milk, so she relented.

"Towel first, that dress is dry clean only."

As soon as Arthur had secured one of the hotel towels over himself like a bib, she forked over the curry. "It's probably fruitless to ask," he said after the first bite, "but I've been wondering what the hell happened when you taught Eames to forge Makio. Whatever it was, it was worse than a typical dream-collapse. And don't ever pull the lead like that again—you could've torn the vein or damaged the PASIV. If you're afraid to let him wake up on his own, turn the chair over or splash water on him."

She raises her eyebrows at him. "I didn't have time for that. It wasn't the kind of dream you just leave someone in when it's collapsing. He could've been in unbearable agony for several minutes as it was." Then she pins her hair out of the way and starts on her makeup. "And it _is_ fruitless to ask what happened, unless you plan to pay for the secret. I can promise you that I absolutely won't let it interfere with my very first job while my uncle is watching every move I make."

In the mirror, she catches the slide of his expression from suspicious to angry—and perhaps slightly jealous? Let him think whatever he likes, as long as he still isn't willing to pay.

"And what the hell does _that_ mean?" he asks sharply.

"Anything I can do to make this job go smoothly, I have done and will continue to do. If you're really all that interested, I may tell you the price _after_ the job is done. For now, I'll simply say that you have _no idea_ what sort of things are hiding in that man's mind." She finishes up her setting powder and starts to line her eyes.

"The same could be said of most people."

Tak pauses to give his reflection a long, level look (she learned it from her uncle; it's a fine cultural treasure that the Japanese have perfected it over centuries). "I don't mean the usual harmless things like celebrity crushes and white lies and cheating on taxes," she says coldly, and smudges her liner a little. "No one moves like that or uses a gun like that without military training and a lot of experience. No one pretends to be other people so well without wanting desperately to hide who he really is. I know what I'm talking about, Arthur, when I say that you really, truly, have _no idea_. And I'm not going to tell you for free."

He tips his chin down and looks away. Disappointment, but concession.

She waves her liner pencil at him before tossing it back into her makeup kit. "Eat your food, or you'll have to wait until we get back and reheat it."

So he sulks and eats his curry, and she hurriedly wolfs down her own before getting to work on styling the bright raspberry-red wig.

"I hate my life," Arthur announces after brushing his teeth.

"That's a lie," Tak dismisses.

His reflection scowls at her. "At this particular juncture, dressed in women's clothing, with adorable lacy garters scratching in awkward places and an extremely ostentatious wig destined for my head, I hate my life. Later, in my own clothes, I'll probably stop hating it again."

"Shush, you'll be gorgeous."

It isn't quite true. He's very pretty as a man, but he has the wrong facial structure to be pretty as a woman—his chin and brow are too strong, and his nose is a bit big. Still, he's not the worst material she's had to work with. Some false eyelashes, some minor overlining of his lips, the long round-frame cut of the wig's bangs…

"And don't make that face, it's very unladylike."

His scowl only deepens. "Correction: I don't hate my life, I hate _you_. With nearly every fiber of my being."

"Don't exaggerate so much."

**.End.**


	25. A Favor for a Friend

drunk!Arthur. he is hilarious and has silly friends.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OCs: Tak Shibuya, Saja. taking liberties with how the characters met/how long they've known each other. blatant crossover LOL. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s*** and f***).

**pairing:** hints of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the night of the finished job in Tokyo.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) MerianMoriarty asked for J-drama sub cons. 2) i don't think the Losers ever mention their unit's official designation. lima stands for L in several radio alphabets, so it seemed as good as anything. 3) Holly & Beth are Jensen's sister and niece in my Losers fics. 4) the Wonderland Watch, introduced in **White Rabbit** has a flamingo croquet mallet for a minute hand and a hedgehog for the hour hand, and the Cheshire Cat's grin on one of the visible gears.

* * *

><p><strong>A Favor for a Friend<strong>

Aside from the mark's strange, daytime-television sub cons, the job was as easy as they come. Sure, Arthur was practically accosted by an over-enthusiastic projection that seemed to think he was her childhood love…but other than the _weird_-factor, it was cut-and-dried. In her quaint little secret hiding place, the mark had stashed a veritable treasure trove of names and numbers, and Arthur's trained long enough that his photographic memory works in dreams, too.

Afterward, Eames offered (somewhat grudgingly, it seemed) to treat them all to drinks.

Saja and Ariadne started off with daiquiris, Eames called for a beer and a shot of tequila, Tak demanded top-shelf Scotch (Eames flinched, but didn't say anything…was this the price of her continued silence?). Arthur ordered bourbon on the rocks, and has had maybe another one or two since. Saja has moved on to margaritas, but Ariadne is drinking her share of the daiquiris to make up for it.

It's almost last call, and they've all agreed they should stop with this round. The receipt is sitting facedown between Eames and Arthur. It looks quite long, considering the fact that it's been just the five of them (Dom excused himself after the first drink).

"So th' mobius layer w's good?" Ariadne frets.

"Yes, yes, it was brilliant, I promise," Eames assures her for the fourth time. "We could've stayed there all day and had a picnic lunch."

"Mobius?" asks Saja.

"One-sided object," Tak tells her. "Take a strip of paper, twist it once and join the ends, then trace a pen down one side—you'll go around and around and _meet_ the line where you started, because it only _looks_ like it has two sides. It's a paradox, like the Penrose steps, or the self-filling aqueduct."

"She said th' P-word!" laughs Ariadne. "God, don't get Arthur started on optical 'lusions in dream-architecture."

"So what's a Pen-whatsit?" Saja presses, leaning toward Arthur.

"Um." He blinks, bullying his alcohol-slurred mind into action. He takes his pen from his pocket, grabs one of Eames' discarded drink napkins, and draws her an example. "The Penrose staircase is an infinite staircase illusion. Using skewed perspective, you make it appear that a square staircase is continuously ascending or descending…but you couldn't actually build it in reality, and if you could, it wouldn't be a square, and it would be tilted funny."

Arthur is aware he's rambling a little, and probably not explaining it properly. It's much easier to show than tell. When he casts a stealthy, self-conscious look around the table, Ariadne is digging her straw around the dregs of her last drink, Tak is folding one of Ariadne's drink napkins into some variety of origami animal, Saja looks attentive but confused, and Eames—well, Eames is staring with the kind of carefree grin people wear when they're watching kittens play. Once again, Arthur catches that familiar twinkle in his eye…a twinkle of '_you're so clever_,' a twinkle of '_I'm crazy about you_.'

His ears feel hot, so he looks away, clears his throat, and crumples the napkin. Beneath it, the receipt bears the indentations of his little sketch, and Eames swiftly pockets it.

Arthur doesn't know how to feel about that.

"We should…" he says. "It's late. We should all be getting to bed, so we can be rested for our flight tomorrow."

"I get first go at the shower," Eames announces as he stands from the table. "Unless you'd care to conserve water."

Arthur pointedly steps away. "There is more than enough water to go around, Mr. Eames."

Ariadne snickers.

It takes a few minutes for all five of them to stagger out to the elevators (Tak's the only one walking perfectly straight, and she works on steering Ariadne) and from the elevators to their suites.

Arthur doesn't mind letting Eames get the shower first; he needs to sit down for a bit before he can risk the hot water without passing out. He drops down onto a chair in the sitting room and turns the television on (some pretty pop idol is teaching the audience how to cook).

As he relaxes, he starts shedding layers. Shoes, socks, blazer, tie… Arthur is down to slacks and undershirt, still waiting for his turn in the shower, when his phone rings.

Arthur's phone has only numbers in it, no names—mostly for security. If someone—Blue Sun Enterprises, Cobol Engineering, Naya Ventures—gets his phone, they'll only have the numbers, not the names, and that'll give Arthur time to warn people. It doesn't inconvenience him one bit, since he knows all the numbers and has the corresponding names in his head.

The number is unfamiliar. Means one of three things: one, it's a wrong number; two, it's a new number for someone he knows; three, it's a new contact, passed his number by someone he knows.

He answers his phone with a neutral, "Yes?"

_~"So this _is_ your number! Sweet action. You know the CIA's still got you listed as a top-level intelligence-gathering asset?"~_

He suppresses a sigh. It was really only a matter of time before that scatter-brained chatterbox needed another favor. "And they have this number?"

Over the line, he hears the clicking of a keyboard. _~"Not anymore. And your official asset code has been changed to General Query Management Facilitator. You're welcome."~_

Arthur snorts. "You're hilarious. Why are you calling me, Jake? Not that it isn't absolutely wonderful to hear from you for the first time in three years, but being contacted by someone who's being hunted by just about every agency and bureau in the United States could be a real inconvenience for me."

_~"Aw, that hurts. I see your point, but it still hurts. Besides, Lima Company is dedzors, how can people be hunting us?"~_

"You know how persistent the CIA can get. How are Holly and Beth?"

_~"They're super-duper. How's Shelley 'n Isaac? Still naming small furry critters after you?"~_

"Ugh. Yes. I don't get it—is it a boy thing? Beth's never named a hamster 'Jake.'"

_~"It's so creepy that you know that, Art."~_

"I also know the Petunias went six and one last year, losing in the playoffs to a bunch of giant girls who look like they're on steroids. A very persistent man in glasses was dragged off the field after arguing with the ref. There's some great YouTube footage. Who's the scary-looking chick next to Clay?"

_~"That's just Aisha. She's tame as a kitten."~_

Arthur grunts and digs around for clean clothes to change into after his shower. He realizes he may have had more than enough bourbon when he lists to one side. "Didn't you once call Alvarez 'tame as a kitten'? The same Alvarez who was written up for grievous bodily harm something like eight times one year and has over three hundred confirmed kills?"

_~"Okay, yes, there's that… But Aisha makes him look pretty tame."~_

The very idea is laughable, so Arthur laughs. "God, Clay has possibly the world's worst taste in women."

_~"Oh, no, she's awesome and very badass…she's just also fucking batshit crazy."~_

"Well, that makes everything better. Returning to the point, Jake. You called me. Why?"

_~"I was hoping that you, in all your Arthurly wisdom and leet intel-gathering ability, could maybe get your hot little hands on some info for us. Please be cool about this, Art, I told them you're a slice of deep-fried awesome wrapped in bacon and dipped in awesome sauce."~_

Arthur doesn't suppress the sigh this time. "You _told_ your _unit_ about me. Jake, what part of 'my obscenely well-paying job is so illegal most countries don't even know it exists' didn't filter through your ears properly the first fifty times?"

There's what he imagines to be an embarrassed silence on the other end of the line. _~"Did you know that tigers are the only felines besides housecats that can purr on the inhale?"~_

"I did know that, Jake; please concentrate. The first rule of being Arthur's friend without Arthur hunting you down and beating your skull in is _you do not talk about Arthur_. Just like Fight Club, the second rule is the same as the first."

_~"I am Jack's childlike after-the-fact contrition. Did I mention how awesome you are?"~_

"You did, but it doesn't hurt to repeat it. I'm vulnerable to flattery after a glass of bourbon. Or three. Or four. I forget. No, if it'd been four, I wouldn't have been able to walk up to the room unaided. What kind of information are we talking about? Not electronic, or you'd've gotten it yourself. Something hardcopy? Or something—what was the phrase you used? Squishy-copy?"

_~"Hardcopy. We can't afford your squishy-copy rates."~_ Someone says something, and Jake's voice goes hollow and muted, like he's turned away from the phone. _~"I'm serious. You've gotta be a frigging financial institution to afford to hire Artie for what he does for a living. A little low-risk poking around I can whine out of him as a favor, but no way would he do an actual job for the kinda scratch we can send his way."~_

"A reduced fee might be negotiable, depending on the mark," Arthur says. "We're breaking in a new girl, and she needs all the experience she can get."

_~"Dude, no, I can't get you into this kinda shit, Art,"~_ groans Jake. _~"We're after a jackass egomaniac super-spy from hell."~_

"Ye of little faith," chides Arthur, wondering in his moderate inebriation what he did with his watch. "I'm a GQMF, says so right in my CIA file. I'm serious business, bitch."

_~"You—wow, you're really drunk, man."~_

Arthur snorts and goes over to the chair where he left his waistcoat. "I'm not _that_ drunk. There you are, Bill…"

_~"Who's Bill?"~_

"Lizard. With a ladder. Alice in Wonderland?"

_~"You're hallucinating literary characters?"~_

"What? No. Jake, you're not making any sense. I was looking for my watch. I love this crazy-ass watch. Okay, so you're after a spy. What's this info you need me to get? His whereabouts? His movements? His spending habits? His girlfriend?" He checks the time—the flamingo weaves back and forth for a while. "Damn stupid flamingo…"

If he were sober, he might worry that Jake is on the verge of seriously doubting his sanity. Right now, he's in that fuzzy state of assuming everyone is following his train of thought (and it's not like Jake has any room to talk about anybody _else's_ lack of sanity).

When the flamingo decides to behave, Arthur sees that Eames has been in the shower for an unfair amount of time.

_~"Right. So. Yeah, the full file, or what you can get of it. Um, the only name we have on him is Max, but I can email you a pic."~_

There's something wrong about that, something tickling in the back of Arthur's mind, and he'll figure it out in a moment, he's sure. Some connection between the name Max and the phrase 'jackass egomaniac super-spy.' "Yeah. Do that. I'll—"

"Shower's all yours, darling," Eames sings out. "Though why we couldn't just _share_, I'm sure I don't know."

He flies the finger without looking. He's not sure if he'd prefer Eames to be fully clothed or wearing just a towel, so he forgoes the possibility of disappointment by staring at the cat-grin edging its way into view behind the hedgehog.

_~"Wow. New boyfriend? British accents are so hot."~_

Arthur scowls. "Jake, go die in a fire. Eames, are you just physically incapable of _not_ brazenly butting your way into other people's conversations?"

"My sense of humility was amputated when I had my sense of propriety removed, dear."

Arthur doesn't doubt that. "Jake, stop thinking your stupid thoughts. Mr. Eames is my coworker, and we're rooming together because it would be cruel and impolite to force him on any of our female coworkers. Send me that pic, I'll look up everything there is about your friend Max."

_~"Roger-dodger. Talk more later."~_

"Bye." And he hangs up.

Eames is already tucked safely under the blankets on his own bed by the time Arthur manages to stand up without falling back down.

"Who was that?" Eames yawns.

Arthur fetches his clean sleep things and saunters toward the bathroom. "A drop-dead gorgeous blond computer genius that I've known longer than I've known Cobb."

"Mm, anyone would think you're trying to make me jealous."

"Go to sleep, Mr. Eames."

**.End.**


	26. Like Mr Y

babysitter!Tak teases Arthur because she can, and Arthur apparently has friends in multiple fandoms.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya. taking liberties with how the characters met/how long they've known each other. blatant crossover LOL. language: pg-13 (for use of s***).

**pairing:** hints of Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the day after the job in Tokyo (if they left around nine or ten in the morning, they'd get to LA in time for Dom to drive Phillipa to school).

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) the return of the 'fixed' fairy tales! i'm pretty sure MerianMoriarty was the one who pointed out to me that shoving the witch into her own oven stank slightly of elder abuse...then again, she's almost always on the bad guys' side when it comes to fairy tales. 2) Scully of the X-Files self-bleeped by saying things like "bleep bleeping bleepedy-bleeps" if she had to relay the words of someone who was swearing (like Mulder). 3) Ashputtel is the German version of Cinderella, as mentioned in **Be Right Back**. 4) the story of Tantalus and Pelops is a classical Greek myth. king Tantalus gets to spend the rest of eternity in Hades suspended just out of reach of a sumptuous feast because he tried to feed his son Pelops to the gods (this is where we get the word 'tantalize'). more specifically, he put Pelops in a soup and waited until everybody had a big mouthful and started exclaiming over how delicious it was before he told them what was in it, and by that point Demeter had already eaten part of Pelops' shoulder (this was the part that pissed the gods off). the gods resurrected Pelops, but he was missing that chunk of his shoulder, so they replaced it with silver. yeah, Greek myth is rife with infanticide and cannibalism. 5) it's pretty much impossible to find a DVD copy of the first Koukaku Kidoutai movie these days. 6) once again, "the cat" is a reference to "Breakfast at Tiffany's." when Tak says "the cat," she means Eames. 7) during fight-or-flight, the face goes pale and the hands get cold because blood is being redirected to the legs. 8) James totally drew Shrek for his ogre. 9) the Letter People! oh, man, have you ever seen the original Letter People episodes? all you need to know is that the vowels were girls, the consonants were guys, and each one had a specific trait that started with his or her particular letter (except X, who was miXed-up). Mr. Y had a huge orange mustache and yodeled. 10) children don't get their brain-to-mouth filters installed until about seven, i've noticed. 11) Jensen changed Arthur's official CIA description to GQMF in **A Favor for a Friend**. 12) "keep an eye out"...Auggie, a character from the show Covert Affairs, is blind. (and smokin' hot, but i digress.)

**Japanese and French mini-glossary**  
>œuf = egg<br>jisan = oncle = uncle

* * *

><p><strong>Like Mr. Y<strong>

Arthur doesn't like what he's learning.

In the sober light of day (which had been stabbing into his eyes through a bourbon hangover), his brain had helpfully arranged 'Max' and 'super-spy' with an equals sign and the word 'rogue' between them. As soon as their flight had landed in LA, he'd started making calls.

That's one of Jake's shortcomings—he often underestimates the usefulness of _people_ over _computers_. Sure, computers don't lie, but people know more. People know all kinds of things they'd tell a trusted friend but never write down. People know a million bits and pieces of information that'll be forgotten when they die. His eyes are _this_ shade of blue, he likes his eggs cooked like _that_, his favorite word is _such-and-such_.

_People_ see far more than _computers_ ever can, simply because they're people.

…which is why he graciously accepted Dom's offer to 'come say hi to the kids'—that, and the thought of Phillipa's big blue eyes and crocodile tears if she ever found out he'd turned down an invitation to come see her.

So he's sitting at the table with his laptop while Tak sits under the window and reads James very skewed versions of fairytales.

"—and then he ran up behind her, kicked her into the oven, and slammed the door shut," says Tak in a dramatic voice. "A clear case of elder abuse and manslaughter."

"Poor old hungry witch!" James agrees.

"Indeed," says Tak. "And then—please suspend your disbelief, it's magic—the birds who ate Gretel's trail of breadcrumbs felt so sorry that they led Hansel and Gretel's father to the gingerbread house. He completely ignored the smell of burning pork coming from the oven and took his children home, where the dirty little murdering creeps lived happily ever after."

"That's horrible!"

"That's life. Sometimes horrible people get away with doing horrible things."

"Don't tell him that," Arthur admonishes. One of his contacts has sent him a text that essentially says the current Max is one of the worst ever and is apparently impossible to catch.

"I disapprove of giving children unhelpful, overidealized visions of the world," Tak replies. "It's fine to have an imagination, to fantasize, to dream of things that aren't…but it shouldn't be such an unpleasant shock to them when they leave home and discover that the human race is full of selfish _bleepedy-bleeps_."

He can't fault her argument, so he turns his attention back to the email he was composing.

"Now do Ashputtel!" says James.

"You always want Ashputtel, you bloodthirsty little thing; remind me to tell you the story of Tantalus and Pelops later. For now, it's time for your letters. Do you remember where we left off?"

"Last time you were here, we did G," James replies obediently. "But then, when you and Daddy were gone, I wanted to keep going. So Grandma helped me instead. We're ready for O!"

"Wow, you got _that_ far without me? Pretty soon you won't need me at all. Go get your stuff and draw me five things that start with O—besides _œuf_, since you used egg back on E."

When James has jumped down from the window seat and scampered into the next room, Arthur glances at Tak. "You said you'd tell me the price after the job was done. Well, the job's done, and here we are."

"Here we are," she says, waving an arm. "But be specific, so I don't quote you the wrong price."

"Very funny."

"I'm not joking."

He stares at her for a long time, feeling the ache and tiredness of jet lag catching up to him again. "I want to know what you and Eames were really doing. If you really were teaching him a forge, then there was something wrong with his mixture—the drugs we use for work can have nasty side-effects if they're used in the wrong dosage."

She leans forward, props her elbows on her knees. "Let's be clear, now… Wanting to know what we did and wanting to know whether I was really teaching him the forge are two different things. The former involves telling you things Mr. Eames doesn't want you to know, so the latter would be much cheaper."

"Can you please just drop your bullshit 'woman of mystery' shtick for five minutes?" Arthur asks irritably. "How much?"

"For the yes or no answer, I want the dual-language DVD release of the first Ghost in the Shell movie. Payment in advance, of course."

Arthur feels the urge to hit her, but he's come to realize that it's just his natural reaction to most of the things she says and does. "Just give me a dollar amount," he grunts.

"Your investment of time and effort is part of the payment," she counters.

He wishes he didn't care so much what the answers are. He consoles himself that Tak likes Eames too much to keep quiet if there's a major risk of brain damage. "Waste of time," he says, but types himself a note anyway.

"You aren't working on a new job already, are you?" There's a note of incredulity in Tak's voice.

Arthur arches an eyebrow and goes back to his emails. "In a way. The preliminary work is a favor for a friend. If it looks like we can do a good extraction without much heavy lifting, we'll do that, too. Not for free, of course…but cheaply."

Tak leans back against the window again. "The cat was right—you never stop working."

"I _frequently_ stop working," Arthur grunts. "Mr. Eames wouldn't know because Mr. Eames is my _coworker_, so he only sees me at work."

"Hmmmm. But didn't you meet Mr. Cobb around the same time that the cat met Mrs. Cobb?"

Arthur misses a key and looks sharply at the girl in the window seat.

Her face is placid, just to the smiling side of blank.

"Dom told you," he guesses.

From her smile, he's only partly right.

"And Eames told you?"

She shakes her head. "I guessed. Go much farther back than when he started dream-sharing and he shuts up tighter than a Mother Superior's thighs. Since her father, who was his teacher at some point, was the one to introduce him to dream-sharing, he probably met her a short time earlier. So I'll say…something like eight years. That matches with how long ago Mr. Cobb says he met you."

Arthur feels his hands go cold. Stupid fight-or-flight instinct… "Did he say _how_ we met?"

"He said 'work,' I heard 'high-level government.'" Tak shrugs. "I doubt it'll ever occur to Mr. Eames to put that on his itemized list of questions to ask me, but if it did he'd probably be intrigued."

"Is that so?" Arthur asks nonchalantly. "I don't see what that has to do with the fact that Mr. Eames and I are coworkers."

"Don't you?"

He snorts. True, he and Eames are (were?) close friends of two separate halves of a married couple, so one might think they'd been forced together during off-duty hours for things like family events. The problem with that theory is that Arthur and Eames were both in high demand before Mal died, both traveling almost constantly, and their outside lives only collided a handful of times—helping the Cobbs move house, celebrating Mal's birthday a couple of times, celebrating Phillipa's third birthday.

"I'm done, I'm done, I'm done!" cries James, stampeding back into the room with a piece of paper.

Tak makes a show of accepting and surveying the paper. "An orange O…you remembered obelisk…Oliphaunt—someone's been watching Lord of the Rings again…an oblong octagon…ogre—you can't use him again for S, so don't even think about it…and a big red octopus, very nice."

James bows ostentatiously, like a conductor before a concert.

"What else starts with O?" Tak asks the little boy. "What sound do piggies make?"

"Oink!"

"And the French word for _jisan_?"

"_Oncle_!"

"And another word for stubborn?"

"Obstinate! Obstinate O!" James twirls in celebration. "If only the vowels are girls, then do some of the consonants have boyfriends instead of girlfriends?"

"I wouldn't be surprised," says Tak. "The Letter People are very laid-back and accepting."

"If Mr. Y is a vowel sometimes, is that like a boy who dresses like a girl sometimes?"

"No, Mr. Y is more like Uncle Arthur, I think."

Arthur sputters and glares at Tak.

"What d'you mean, Tak?" asks James, all wide-eyed innocence.

"Yes, what _do_ you mean, Tak?" growls Arthur.

"He likes vowels and consonants both."

James appears to seriously contemplate this information. "You mean he likes pretty girls _and_ cute boys?"

"Exactly."

"Ohhhhhh," James says in sudden understanding. "So that's what Daddy means when he says God needs to send Uncle Arthur a girlfriend or a boyfriend and he doesn't care which one, just hurry?"

Tak smiles. Arthur wants to throw something at her. He also wants her to stop showing James the original (extremely politically incorrect) versions of classic educational programs for preschoolers.

"Do you like Tak, Uncle Arthur? I think Tak's pretty, don't you? She knows a lot of stuff, too, she's _so smart_, I bet she knows _everything_, so if you made Tak your girlfriend you could ask her whatever you wanted and she'd know the answer, like _why is the sky blue_ and _why do doggies bark and kitties meow_."

Arthur debates saying that _no_, he does _not_ like Tak; in fact, he's never met another person besides his sister who so thoroughly both annoyed and amused him. Not even _Eames_ gets on his nerves so thoroughly, and Eames at least has the redeeming quality of being, on occasion, incredibly charming.

He's saved by his phone ringing. He makes sure to lock his laptop before he retreats to the porch. "I didn't think you'd have anything this soon, Aug," he says as he answers the phone.

_~"For the company's only official GQMF, I pulled some strings,"~_ Auggie replies cheerfully. _~"Tell me you didn't self-nominate for that, or I may lose some respect for you."~_

"Please," scoffs Arthur. "I wouldn't do something like that sober, and you know I can't hack drunk."

_~"Jake?"~_

"Jake."

Auggie lets out a gusty sigh that crackles over the line. _~"Anyway, Art…your pal Max ran away from home about twenty months ago. Unfortunately, he took cards and keys with him when he went, so he has access to his uncle's finances, the tool shed, the garage, you name it. Several friends and family are looking for him, including some of the less forgiving family members."~_

Great. So the rogue spy Jake and his friends are after has access to government-caliber money, tools, weapons, and vehicles, and is being tracked by wetworks operatives who may respond violently to the presence of competition.

_~"I'm sure I don't need to tell you, but Max is a very bright, very _troubled_ boy."~_

Of course he is. "Is there anyone who might know where he went? An old friend or a former coworker, someone who could give some kind of insight?"

_~"Well, there's one well-informed coworker from before your time with the company…but he's extra-crispy, so all I can give you is a name and a city."~_

Double-great. A burned spy from the old school. He'll be either a psychopath bent on revenge or a washed-up drunk whining about the 'good old days.'

"So give me the name and the city," Arthur prompts.

_~"Michael—no nicknames—Westen—with an E, not an I—in Miami."~_

Oh, _hell no_. "Miami?" says Arthur, and just saying it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. "Miami like _America's nursing home_ Miami? Miami like _the CSI with the weirdest cast_ Miami?"

_~"Yep."~_

"Shit. I hate Miami. Well, keep an eye out for anything else, will you?"

_~"Ohoho, 'keep an eye out,' I see what you did there."~_

Arthur flinches. "Sorry, bad choice of words. Thanks for all your hard work, Aug; I owe you a drink and a favor."

_~"An Arthur favor. I think I come out ahead on this."~_

Arthur hangs up and considers his options.

Pass the name and city to Jake, turn him loose. Go talk to Westen himself. Work an extraction on Westen.

He doesn't like any of them, but number two is probably the best bet.

"When this is over, Jake, you owe me a suit," Arthur mutters to himself.

"Ooh, who's Jake?" Tak suddenly asks from right behind Arthur, startling him.

"You're as bad as Eames!" he growls at her.

"So you hate Miami, you owe Aug a drink and a favor, and Jake owes you a suit?"

Arthur's left eyebrow twitches. "Feel free to mind your own damn business at any point, Tak."

She grins. "Oh, Arthur…where would any of us be if we minded our own damn business?"

**.End.**


	27. Everywhere and Nowhere

when the audience needs to know something, you find a character who needs to know, too. in this case, Tak. have some exposition.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya. taking liberties with how the characters met/how long they've known each other. language: g.

**pairing:** none/gen (with a teeny hint of some Arthur/Eames).

**timeline:** several months post-movie; later in the same day as **Like Mr. Y**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) sandwich cutters are...odd but amazing. 2) i am completely making things up now. except that too much electrical activity in the brain really would start to cause chemical imbalance, electrical damage, and temperature spikes. 3) poor Tak. "but Limbo sounds so COOL!" "no, bad!"

* * *

><p><strong>Everywhere and Nowhere<strong>

"I want to know more about Limbo," Tak says.

Arthur is startled—his eyes widen a little, his brows furrow, his shoulders rise and tense. "What for? All you need to know is that dying under sedation will send you to the deepest reaches of your subconscious, where your brain will play around with fantasies and memories and nightmares until either you're convinced it's reality or you just go crazy."

"It _sounds_," she says slowly, "like Limbo is closer to natural dreaming, and that we could learn more about someone in far less real-world time by dropping him into Limbo and following to see what he builds."

"No," he says, and it sounds more like a scold than a response.

_Bad girl, no biscuit._

"Why?" she presses.

He stares at his laptop.

Tak patiently finishes the sandwiches for the kids' afternoon snack (peanut butter and marmalade for James, peanut butter and banana for Phillipa, halved and decrusted with a dinosaur-shaped sandwich cutter). She eats James' crusts while she waits.

"Limbo is—it's everywhere and nowhere. It's unfiltered, it's the most basic of basics, raw and pure. It's… Even a minute in Limbo could cause irrevocable mental damage."

"That sounds awfully alarmist coming from a practical man such as yourself, Arthur," Tak points out. "Is there something hiding in your subconscious that scares you?"

He frowns thinly. "Anyone who isn't scared of what's lurking in his subconscious is stupid or deluded. Look, I'm not exactly qualified to tell you much about Limbo; I've never been there."

"…but you know someone who has," she guesses as she fills three cups with juice.

"Dom's been. And Ariadne. And your uncle."

_That's_ interesting.

"He didn't mention that," says Tak.

"The only people who've been to Limbo and come out sane don't talk about it much," he mutters. "Think about it—the deepest parts of your subconscious are where your mind stores all the memories and emotions that shaped you. All the things you dreamed of as a child, all the things you hoped for in your life, all your darkest fears, all the things that hurt you the most… And I don't know about you, Miss Golightly, but my life hasn't exactly been rainbows and roses, so I'll _pass_ on voluntarily putting myself at the mercy of my own subconscious."

"Oh?"

He glares at her. "My mother's been divorced three times, starting when I was five—yes, I've been to therapy for it—and it really only goes downhill from there."

"I see your point," Tak says neutrally. "He hates cold, damp weather, which is interesting considering he probably grew up in London and Windsor. Parents either separated or working far apart, because he has a natural inclination to dote on women and mistrust men, despite his preferences."

Arthur blinks. "What?"

"You gave me a secret. I paid you for it." She goes to the back door, leans out. "Snack time, everyone!"

All three Cobbs enter the house in a flurry of laughter and gleeful squeals.

"Cobb, will you talk some sense into this girl?" Arthur grouses.

Cobb glances up from helping James onto a chair. "Sense? About what?"

"Limbo."

"The game with the pole you go under?" Phillipa asks, face fixed in an expression of utter confusion.

"Uh, yeah, heh," Cobb lies awkwardly. "Um, Tak, if you'd accompany me into the study…?"

Once they're down the hall with the door shut, he looks at her appraisingly. "So what sort of sense do I need to talk into you?" he asks her.

"I want to know more about Limbo," she tells him simply. "From everything Arthur's said, it seems like we'd get farther faster if we just dropped a mark into Limbo and followed to see what he'd built."

"No," he says, scolding just like Arthur. "No, it takes a certain kind of mind—a well-trained mind—to be able to spend more than a short amount of time in Limbo without being affected by it."

She throws her hands up. "Well, what _happens_?"

Cobb heaves a deep sigh and sits down, gesturing for Tak to do the same.

Tak opts to sit on the floor, so that she can face him without being too far away.

"Lots of things happen, both physically and mentally. In your mind, the first thing to go is your sense of reality. Just like with a natural dream, you find yourself there without knowing how you got there or what you were doing. If you have your totem, you can check it, but soon that doesn't matter. You forget more and more with every moment, caught up in whatever your mind is spinning _right then_. You could forget what your totem is for, what it means, how to check it. You could decide you like your fantasy better than real life."

"But dreams are just echoes," she argues. "They're ideas we had, passing thoughts, memories. Taped-together pieces of our daily experience that represent what our brains are doing to digest and file the information. Dreams have their place, but reality is more useful."

Cobb points at her. "Good. I agree. There are things—amazing, wonderful things—that our minds can't conceive of, things that could only happen here, in the waking world. Think of the people you've met in your life. All the most interesting ones, the ones you care about most, could you ever have imagined them, if they'd never existed? Only reality can give us something as complex as a person. But there are people who are so dissatisfied with life, so isolated from the beautiful things reality can give us, that they'd immediately believe the fantasy. They'd…_wrap themselves up in it_, cocoon themselves. They'd just hide there, far away from the things that hurt them, the things they couldn't reach, the things that didn't give them what they wanted…" He trails off, almost wistfully. "The only way out is to accept that you're dreaming, and that can be almost impossible for some people."

Tak narrows her gaze in thought. "And what about the physical aspect?"

Cobb shakes himself slightly. "Well, the average person, even asleep, only uses something like twenty percent of their brain at once."

"_His_ brain," she mutters under her breath.

He ignores her. "That's, of course, referring to levels of significant electrical activity, not just the baseline level—because every part of the human brain is put to some use or other, whether it's storage, calculation, processing sense information, problem analysis, whatever—only dead brain tissue is _completely_ inactive. A person using a PASIV, especially in a multi-level dream, can end up using close to thirty percent, like a concert pianist playing his favorite Mozart concerto. A person in Limbo uses still more. Every part of the brain that processes incoming information, several key reasoning centers, emotion, various bits and pieces of memory, are all lit up like a Christmas tree."

The mental image is distracting, and Tak very nearly giggles. She has to bite the inside of her lower lip and give a very serious nod.

Cobb doesn't seem to notice (or is ignoring her again). "But the human brain isn't actually designed to have a large percentage of it used at once. Like over-clocking a computer, you start to see side-effects—increased temperature, chemical imbalance, stress damage to neurons. If you're down that deep for more than about an hour real-time, your brain starts to literally cook. Even after you get out of Limbo, your brain needs another few hours of sleep to readjust, assuming you didn't manage to cause any permanent damage to yourself."

"Like with encapsulation?"

"Exactly."

Tak shakes her head. "Still, just _ten minutes_ of real-time could be decades in Limbo. We'd be in and out in a snap; we wouldn't have to worry about the physical side-effects."

Cobb grins wryly. "The human brain is a largely misunderstood piece of precision machinery, Tak. Some of the dream-sharing chemicals can make the side-effects of Limbo much worse, and you still have to worry about whether the mark would drive himself insane. Limbo is not a playground."

"And I'm not a child," Tak reminds him.

Slowly, he leans back in his chair and rubs his knees. "We never like to think of our limitations, but you're not invincible, Tak. You're very good, and you're learning so fast…I just don't want you to get cocky and land yourself in a situation you can't handle."

She smiles. "No, that's Mr. Eames' job."

"Don't let Arthur hear you say that," he chuckles.

**.End.**


	28. Welcome to Miami

old school, meet new school. a minor detour.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). blatant crossover(s) with Burn Notice and The Losers. language: pg-13 (for s***).

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; later in the same week as **Everywhere and Nowhere**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) poor Michael. 2) Anderson as in Auggie Anderson (from Covert Affairs), who was revealed in **Like Mr. Y** to be a mutual friend to Jensen and Arthur. 3) Michael's first op with Cougar was back in **Asset**.

* * *

><p><strong>Welcome to Miami<strong>

Michael does not like surprises. He usually deals with them very well, but he doesn't _like_ them. Even the fun ones. Even with strawberries.

Surprises involving his mother are the worst.

It goes without saying that he is livid when he carries in a bag of last-minute baking ingredients and sees a stranger sitting at her kitchen table with her.

And not just any stranger, no—he dresses corporate and moves like an asset. He practically _screams_ 'agency' (or 'organized crime,' but there's often very little difference).

"This is excellent lemonade, Mrs. Westen," says the stranger.

"Well, thank you," Michael's mother preens happily. "There you are, Michael, I was wondering how long it takes to get your poor mother a bag of flour and another dozen eggs…"

Michael flashes a business smile. "Traffic," he replies. "Who's your guest?"

His mother frowns at the stranger. "So when you said you were 'a friend of my son,' you really just meant you were looking for him. I hope you know that I do terrible things to people who threaten my boys."

The stranger just sips his lemonade. "Mr. Westen—or do you prefer Michael?"

Michael drops the fake smile. "Since I don't know you and I have no idea what you want, let's stick with Westen."

"All right. My name is Arthur. I'm going to ask you some questions. I'm going to ask very nicely, and I hope you'll answer them."

Warily, Michael sets the grocery bag down on the kitchen counter. "How nicely?"

Arthur sets a thick manila envelope on the table and holds it open so that Michael can see stacks of bills. "That depends on what you can tell me. Up to fifty thousand dollars, cash. Unmarked, non-sequential. Provided you don't do anything amateurish, it should be perfectly untraceable. Fair warning—I can verify any information you provide, and if you make it necessary, I can get the information without your help."

"Then why pay me?" Michael asks, because the setup doesn't make much sense unless there's some nasty little catch.

Pushing the envelope aside, Arthur folds his hands on the table. "If you answer my questions, we establish a business relationship. You know you can make good money, I know there's someone on the east coast with reliable information. If you don't, I have to do more work and you don't make any money, so please…" Arthur tips his head toward one of the other chairs at the table.

Michael slowly sits. "Okay. Ask your questions."

"I need information on Max, and Anderson led me to believe that you're the man who has that information. So, what can you tell me?"

Michael's hands go cold. "Max, huh? I think you'll have to be a little more specific than that, because—"

"Pretending ignorance wastes your time and mine, Mr. Westen," says Arthur.

"Well, consider this a piece of free advice: leave it alone. Whatever you want isn't worth the pain and aggravation for you _or_ me."

Arthur sips his lemonade. "Of course it is. Information is an amazing and beautiful thing…the amount of trouble you have getting it is roughly proportional to the amount of money someone is willing to pay for you not to spread it around."

What a load of bullshit. "That sounds like a good way to end up dead."

Arthur grins just a little. "For the more discerning elements, I'm more valuable alive. For the less discerning, I carry at least one weapon at all times. I'm not a soft target, Mr. Westen. Now…Max is shop-talk among agents and solo assets. A 'Max' is a high-level agent or operative who's gone rogue. The latest is apparently an egomaniacal sociopath."

"An embarrassing situation for the Agency," Michael concedes.

"Anderson says there's a whole host of people after the guy."

"Sounds about right. He's been loose for more than a year now."

Arthur's eyebrows rise slightly. "Twenty months, I heard. Keep going."

Michael is keenly aware that his mother is not nearly as intent on her baking as she might appear to be. "Y'know, Mom, maybe you could step outside and make a phone call or something."

She glares at him. "No, Michael, I couldn't. Tell the nice young man what he wants to know so we can all get on with our lives."

Of course she'd say that. She doesn't like being run out of her kitchen for anything, _especially_ her own good. Michael sighs. "He's an almost pathological liar, he likes bait-and-switch tactics, he has at least a full group asset still at his disposal, he knows the locations of five major cash stashes, three arms depots that he can't get into anymore without siege weapons, two biological research stations that he can." He pauses and rubs his temple. "He's into sci-fi weaponry—tachyon beam weapons, space lasers, mini rail-guns, sonic dematerializers… He's about six foot, bad hair, sleazy voice, maimed left hand. Scares people just by smiling. Got a god-complex and a need to get some war going to get rapid change enacted. A real piece of work."

Arthur pulls a small notebook from the inside pocket of his blazer and writes something down.

Michael watches him until he stops writing. "I can give you coordinates to the stationary resources he's likely to exploit. I know a few names of assets he may have bought. Other than that, he likes opulence; he likes high-profile, high-discretion hotels. And I'm just about certain he'd have a nervous breakdown without a designer suit. A man's chief vices can tell you a lot about how to find him."

"There's much to be said for a designer suit, Mr. Westen," Arthur says mildly.

Hell, the man's own suit probably cost more than Michael's spent on any _three_ suits.

Arthur pulls another thick manila envelope from somewhere, slides it neatly next to the first. "Can you tell me if he's still in the country?"

Shit.

Michael considers the twin envelopes. A hundred grand could keep him out of trouble for a while. "I could ask around," he replies evasively. "The three assets most likely to make contact with Max are Wade Travis, Milana Belmont, and Aleksandr Mikhailov. Last I heard, Milana was in Poland and Aleksandr was in St. Petersburg, but nobody's heard from Wade in a while."

"Hm," Arthur says noncommittally as he writes.

"Mind if I ask who you intend to sell or not sell this information to?"

"In your case, Mr. Westen, I don't mind. This information is going to a 'Lieutenant Colonel Franklin Clay,' by way of a brilliant idiot named Jensen."

Clay. Clay means Losers, Losers means Alvarez. Michael owes Alvarez. A _lot_.

"I heard Lima Company went down in a chopper crash in South America," Michael says.

"You know better than to listen to a man in front of a podium in a roomful of press, Mr. Westen."

Michael fidgets for a moment, tracing little nonsense patterns on the table with his finger. "Can you put me in touch with them? I actually owe them a favor, and if that chopper crash was a Max-style burn, I'm sure they can use all the help they can get."

"Mm. Interesting." Arthur puts his notebook away, takes another long drink of his lemonade. "I'll follow up on Belmont and Mikhailov. I can't put you in touch with them directly, because Jensen practices very strict comms security. If you tell me your number, I'll pass it to Jensen when I give him my findings, and you can give him those locations you mentioned."

"And how do I know I can trust you with my number?"

"Because if I wanted you dead, I wouldn't come all the way down here to this godforsaken city on the wrinkled ass-end of the country. I'd send someone."

Michael narrows his eyes. "There's a lotta ways to make someone's life hell without killing 'em."

"Well, if _that's_ all I wanted to do, I'd _definitely_ send someone. I know some pretty insufferable people, including this teeny little Japanese thing who may be a mind reader. If you want some kind of guarantee, I can't give you one. I can, however, tell you that Jensen and I were in basic together and were once collectively responsible for replacing our drill sergeant's mustache with a Sharpie equivalent."

"Well. That certainly inspires my trust and confidence," Michael says dryly. "I hate to break it to ya, but most of Clay's people are just names on a screen to me. This Jensen guy sounds like an airhead."

Arthur smirks into his lemonade. "We're on pretty even footing right now, you and me. All I know about you is that you're old school, you supposedly know about Max, and you got burned bad. Maybe you've been lying through your teeth this whole time."

Michael raises his eyebrows. "You said you could verify any information I provide."

"I can, but that's extra work for me, and a pretty big expense."

"More expensive than a hundred grand in bribes to a burned spy?"

Arthur sets his lemonade down and folds his hands together. "I'd barely answer my phone for a hundred grand, Mr. Westen. As I mentioned before, I'd like this to be a nice, civil business relationship. If it turns out that I can't trust the information you give me and I have to come back and get the _real_ information, we'll all be very unhappy. I'll have to work for pennies, Jensen and the Losers will owe me a lot of money, and you may well end up a drooling vegetable, which I'm sure would make your mother very upset. For now, I'm going to assume you've been telling me the truth. Now, will you please give me your number? I practice the utmost discretion with phone numbers, I assure you."

And there Michael's stuck. He can't afford to risk making more enemies, and Arthur seems to be pretty sane and reasonable, as spies go. He writes his cell number on a piece of grocery list paper from the fridge, slides it across the table.

Arthur glances at it, slides it back as he punches the number into his own phone.

Michael takes the piece of paper and lights it on fire over the sink, watching it blacken and shrivel before rinsing the cinders down the drain.

"Thank you very much, Mr. Westen," says Arthur, standing and slipping his phone back in his pocket. "Enjoy your spending money; I look forward to working with you again in the future, preferably from very far out-of-state."

When Arthur is gone (and Michael's mother is smoking sulkily over a bowl of cookie dough), Michael calls Sam. "You ever heard of some young spook named Arthur?"

_~"Might've. Prissy kid, looks like he fell off the cover of GQ, acts like he's got a telephone pole and a Scrabble dictionary up his ass?"~_

"Yeah."

_~"In that case, no. And neither have you, if you know what's good for ya, Mikey. He was deep into intel gathering about eight years back, real James Bond stuff, probably got a lot of the intel you were using at the time. Kid's more than a spook; he's a ghost. Nobody knows _anything_ about him, not even where he _is_ until he's already been and gone. He takes an interest in ya, and boom—inside a week, he knows what you eat, who you screw, what's in your bank account, how many times a day you pick your nose…"~_

"That is _awesome_," Michael sighs with a frown. "I really can't get home visits from nice, normal, _harmless_ people."

_~"Whoa—he was at your place?"~_

"Worse; he was at Mom's."

_~"Damn. I hope you kissed every last inch of his ass, then, buddy. Otherwise, no telling who he'd sell her address to."~_

"I'm starting to get that impression."

**.End.**


	29. A Winning Team

the day starts at crap. it goes downhill from there.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (Saito's niece) and Saja (Yusuf's sister). language: pg-13 (for s*** and g**damn).

**pairing:** a little Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; later in the same week as **Welcome to Miami**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) Eames likes to test Arthur's patience. because he can. 2) the Wonderland watch was first described in **White Rabbit**. on its reverse face is an engraving of the Gryphon and the Mock-Turtle. 3) ...i wear Eternity for Men because my dad wore it, so it's a nostalgic scent for me. 4) as always, the Breakfast at Tiffany's references. if you've never seen it, Holly Golightly coasts through life as a Powder Room Girl (a pretty girl who gets paid to go out with men) and throws huge parties full of people who barely know her. she has a cat whose name is 'cat,' because she refuses to name it until she 'finds a place to belong to.' when Tak says "the cat," she's referring to Eames. 5) inductive reasoning holds that the past cannot infallibly predict the future. we have no way of knowing in advance whether even things like the laws of physics will apply. Eames and Cobb briefly mentioned inductive reasoning in **Feigning Blindness**. 6) Arthur went to Miami to talk to Michael Westen as a favor to Jake Jensen in **Welcome to Miami**. 7) we saw in **Don't or Can't** that spats between Arthur and Eames make Eames into a short-tempered slave-driver. 8) "ETA" = "estimated time of arrival." 9) "Tak's usual mixture" includes a sedative, because she's an unstable sleeper.

* * *

><p><strong>A Winning Team<strong>

"Right, I'll see you at ten," sighs Arthur, hanging up his phone.

Ariadne was not originally part of the plan. In fact, he'd been heavily set against including her, partly because Yusuf experiments far too boldly even when he's _not_ given explicit permission to experiment. Tak has trained and worked closely enough with Eames that Arthur is fairly confident in her safety. And Dom will, of course, be there with them, ready to help prod the metaphorical bear.

He has a gun trained at heart-height when the front door of his suite opens.

Eames pretends to be offended. "Darling, what _can_ you think of me?" he gasps.

"That you should know better than to show up early and not _knock_," Arthur replies.

The forger saunters right up (close, too close), tilts his head, blinks those gorgeous eyes in mock-innocence. "I was sure you knew I don't. Didn't you miss me, dear?"

Arthur's ears feel hot, so he frowns sternly, sidearm still trained on Eames' heart. "I can always try again—I have a whole clip."

Eames laughs and looks pleased with himself. "Now, Arthur, we both know that if you were going to shoot me, you'd already have done it, and you would've aimed for my knees first. Think the question over again, mm? And before you answer, could I trouble you for the time?"

In an automatic motion, Arthur starts to lift his wrist, stops, reaches into the pocket of his waistcoat instead. He freezes, thumb pressed over the smooth roundness of the Mock-Turtle's upturned face.

"Something the matter?" Eames just keeps smiling, leaning down enough that Arthur can catch a faint hint of his scent—fabric softener and the unmistakable almost-tacky come-hither tang of Calvin Klein (for God's sake, who the hell wears Eternity anymore?).

Arthur draws out the Wonderland watch and stares fixedly at the face. The unsteady twirl of the hedgehog gives him time to collect himself. "Ten to nine," he says in a hushed voice. He clears his throat and repeats it more loudly. _For Darling Arthur_, the engraving glints in its tasteful but whimsical script lettering.

"Did you miss me, darling?" Eames asks again, from far too close. There's an edge (a fluffy, warm, well-padded edge) of affection in his tone, and Arthur knows that if he dared to look up, he'd see that terrifying twinkle in Eames' eye. It could be a beautiful twinkle, a cause for hope and joy, if only Arthur trusted Eames.

He doesn't.

He wishes he did, but he doesn't.

Eames lies too much, at the wrong times and about the wrong things, to earn Arthur's trust.

Eames dips his head a little lower, ostensibly to look at the watch himself. He's close enough now that Arthur can feel the heat of his skin. "I've been thinking that we should work together on something like a permanent basis. You can plan your way out of anything and I can improvise my way out of anything—we'd be unstoppable."

"Are you plotting to rule the world?" snorts Arthur.

"Come now, darling…we'd be a grand team, you and I. I could take you to places Cobb can't even imagine. Assuming we could work that specificity kink out of you."

Arthur clenches his jaw and thinks for possibly the hundredth time that Eames really should be bound and gagged before Arthur can try to get anything productive done. "We're here for work; be serious, Mr. Eames," he grunts, snapping the watch closed.

"I'm being perfectly serious. And I know you'll consider the offer for the same reason I know you missed me."

"And why's that?" Arthur asks, knowing he'll regret taking the bait as he finally sets his gun aside.

But as soon as the gun is out of the picture, Eames' lips are on Arthur's cheek. Fleeting, warm, soft—like every kiss Eames has ever put in exactly that spot.

Arthur _wishes like hell_ he trusted Eames…but if this is just another game, just some little adventure to pass the time, just the way Eames wanders through life, catlike and unattached as Holly Golightly…

If there is one thing Arthur refuses to be, it's some charming liar's little adventure.

"Because in all the years we've known each other, you've never yet hit me for doing that," Eames says smugly.

"Don't get cocky—the next time you drop a rock, it might fall up."

Eames laughs and wanders toward the coffee table to flop down on one of the armchairs. "Yes, as you and Cobb are so fond of pointing out. Overconfidence is the number one cause of death in forgers, haven't you heard? Like curiosity and cats."

Something twists in Arthur's gut. He ignores it.

"What have you been up to since Tokyo?"

Arthur makes a face before he can stop himself. "I went to Florida."

"I can't see you enjoying Florida, unless you went to meet Mickey."

"Disney_land_ is better bang for your buck," Arthur dismisses. "I went to Miami to do someone a favor."

"That sounds like a _work_ favor. Darling, you really never stop working, do you? That's frightfully unhealthy."

"Save the condescending mother-hen bullshit for someone who needs it."

There's a long silence. When Arthur glances in Eames' direction, the man looks taken aback.

Great. Just what he needs—he's upset the delicate balance of their forger right before another training session.

_God damn temperamental forgers…_

He hates breaking his rule about apologies, but Tak and Ariadne don't deserve to be bullied just because Eames is in a bad mood.

"I'm sorry I snapped," he says tersely.

"Oh, yes, you're just dripping with sincerity, aren't you?" drawls Eames. "I neither want nor require your false coddling, Mr. Clarke. If you're feeling ill-tempered, I shall simply leave you be."

Arthur's head is starting to ache, just over his eye. He bites back a retort (it'll waste more time, especially if the bickering goes on until Tak and Yusuf arrive). Food. Food always does the trick. "Have you eaten yet?"

Eames settles into his chair a bit more, indolent and catlike as ever. "I'll have the Belgian waffles again, they were excellent last time."

Better. Arthur breathes a little easier as he dials room service.

Yusuf has a pair of bellhops with him when he arrives—one to hold the door and the other to carry in some large and very suspicious looking cases. Tak slips into the room as they leave.

"Time to play mad scientist?" she asks.

"No," Arthur sighs. "Cobb sent for Ariadne. We're waiting on her. He wants you to work on synergistic architecture some more. ETA is…" He flips open his watch again. "…an hour, assuming the plane is on schedule."

"You don't look well. Working too hard is unhealthy, you know."

He glares at her. She's probably immune, if the placid look on her face is any indication. "Yusuf, please tell me you have good news."

"Oh, yes, very," says the chemist, pulling out a cork-stoppered bottle from the neat rows within one of his cases. "Saja's notes and the sample you sent were quite informative. I'd already had something like this in the works, but seeing how the dealer managed increased militarization—of a sort, anyway—gave me some clearer ideas of how to accomplish the opposite. I haven't tested it with a PASIV yet, but it should be safe. We'll have to keep a closer eye on cranial temperature spikes, perhaps."

Tak frowns. "I'm not sure how I feel about the phrase 'should be safe,' in relation to intravenous chemicals and potentially lethal amounts of heat in the vicinity of the cat's brain."

"You want safe, go home and bake cookies, Miss Golightly," Eames mutters.

Arthur flinches when she turns on him.

"Arthur," she says, with a patiently exasperated look straight out of Saito's playbook. "_What_ have you done to the cat _this_ time?"

He glares again (still with no appreciable result). "I believe the answer to that question is _mind your own goddamn business_. Now, testing the new compound will be the _last_ thing we do today—Cobb's dropping in for it, and he specifically said not to do it without him and not to use sedation, except for Tak's usual mixture."

**.End.**


	30. Interim

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (Saito's niece), and Artie the Shade. taking liberties with when/how characters met. language: pg-13 (for f*** and s***).

**pairing:** a little Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; later in the same day as **A Winning Team**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) i'm so awesome i didn't even write down my notes for this thing when i wrote it ages and ages before posting it. giving it a quick scan... 2) the memory Arthur walks into follows closely behind **Supernova** (**Papillon**). probably about a week later. 3) "mad over" means "crazy about" (see also "sweet on"). 4) "beautiful mess" is a reference to the way Tak described Eames' mask in **Beautiful Mess**. 5) Artie's quoting a famous Yeats poem, "Cloths of Heaven." 6) at some point, i think in **Phantasm** (**Papillon**), Eames revealed that shades aren't a problem except for heavy users of dream-sharing drugs. i will wave my hands and say that the drugs have interesting psychological side-effects, including strengthening certain negative aspects of the subconscious (such as Shades). 7) re: combative control of a shared dream...the movie makes it clear that the stability of a dream relies on both the dreamer and the subject (such as when the French street scene explodes because of Ariadne's panic). Nash made it sound like only the dreamer could change the dream, but if other people can bring in projections (such as Mal), i don't see any reason why other lucid dreamers sharing the dream couldn't make changes (except for the obvious problem of increased attention from the mark's sub cons). 8) "the Eames of photographs" is a reference to **The Student**. 9) glock is the Glock 17, super-reliable Austrian 9mm pistol.

* * *

><p><strong>Interim<strong>

There was a stretch of nearly two years before the Fischer Inception where Arthur and Eames were never on the same extraction team. It was unexpected for Arthur, who had assumed that when Dom stopped being able to take legitimate extractions they would be venturing into Eames' territory—thievery.

Even when Mal was alive, they'd all known that Eames played around in the shady underworld of dream-sharing. He'd certainly been some variety of crook before he learned about dream-sharing, and someone like Eames couldn't learn the art of dream-forgery without wanting to use it for personal gain. Arthur and Dom could hardly say anything, though, having essentially stolen their primary PASIV device (it wasn't like the proper owners were ever going to use it again, and Arthur hated the idea of letting such a brilliant invention go to waste).

Arthur had thought that the times when Dom took jobs with one of them but not the other were just a matter of convenience. He'd never suspected for a moment that it could be by Eames' request.

He should have, he reflects as he looks at Eames huddled beside a hotel bed in his best suit, two years younger and ten pounds lighter.

They're testing a compound for Yusuf, one that will help keep the mark less aware of the intrusion of other dreamers. Eames was the obvious choice, because his subconscious is more heavily militarized (and imaginatively violent) than any of the rest of them. In theory, the level of militarization will make it easier to provoke a reaction…if they can't get a reaction out of Eames, they'll never get a reaction out of a mark.

So Arthur stands in a corner of a room he didn't design into the dream, feeling like an intruder, watching Eames sit there with tears falling down his clean-shaven cheeks, shoulders and knees trembling.

It's Arthur's dream, and he didn't put the room here. The building should be a prison, actually; a building Eames, as the subject, would see as secure. Arthur remembers certain details of this hotel room very sharply—the view from the door, the exact fall of the curtains and the color of the light outside, the wear patterns of the carpet. Eames has filled the prison with a memory, and Arthur has somehow wandered in without even meaning to.

He shouldn't have been able to come within a block of the place unobserved, and he shouldn't have been able to set foot in the building without ending up at gunpoint.

_Interesting._

A knock at the door makes Eames jump. He rushes to the bathroom, splashes water on his face.

The knocking turns impatient. "Can't you even be punctual _today_ of all days?" Arthur's own angry voice calls out.

Guiltily, Arthur remembers the day—Mal's funeral. And he remembers that Eames had studied under Miles, like Dom. They'd been in school clubs together, been great friends long before Arthur met them.

But Mal had been Arthur's friend, too, and his confidante. Mal had been the one sitting on the sidelines, egging him on, giving him every encouragement short of actually telling him to quit being such a chicken and ask Eames out. Arthur had just gathered his courage the day that Mal had jumped. He took it as a sign, and maybe he'd been unfairly snappish and unpleasant to Eames for the next week as a result.

Arthur had waited outside Eames' hotel room for five minutes before Eames had come out with a lazy grin on his face, and Arthur had wanted very much to knock the man's teeth out.

Inside the room (the memory of the room), Eames crumples at the harsh words, slipping to the bathroom floor and sitting there like a marionette with its strings cut.

Mal brushes past Arthur (he raises his gun, just in case) and crouches next to Eames. "He doesn't mean to be cruel," she soothes, stroking his back.

Of course. Cobb's projection of Mal is a thing of guilt and anger, but Eames' would naturally be a creation of nostalgia and comfort. Arthur thinks that his own subconscious version of her would be pretty and funny and essentially harmless.

Eames groans and presses the heels of his palms against his eyes. "If this is Arthur's unintentional cruelty, I should hate to incite the intentional kind."

"One day, Sean," Mal promises. "One day, he'll wake up. He'll stop being silly about it. He'll ask you to dinner, and you'll wear something he hates so that he'll want to take it off you. You'll be funny and charming. He'll laugh at your terrible jokes, once he's had a glass or two of wine. You'll walk him home, and his ears will turn pink like they do before he blushes, and he'll ask you if you'd care to come up for coffee."

Arthur expects laughter.

But Eames makes a wounded noise. "One day? One day—Miles, I've been mad over that boy for _four years_, I can't do it anymore. Oh, God…what'll I do without you?"

_Mad over that boy._

Just as Mal described, Arthur feels heat burning in the tips of his ears and knows that it will spread to his cheeks soon. Stupid. So stupid. They're grown men and can't do something so simple as admit they're attracted to one another (have been, mutually, for _years_).

She touches Eames' hair. "You'll go away somewhere," she says sadly. "You'll hide from him and pretend your heart isn't breaking every day you're apart. You're so very good at lying to yourself, aren't you?"

"I don't want to see him. Not today, not ever."

It stings, but he deserves it. He's spent most of their acquaintance snapping at Eames for the sake of his own pride (he's spent half his life telling himself he's too smart to fall for some shallow idiot with a charming smile).

So Eames put on a brave front through the funeral, told Dom he'd never take another job with Arthur, and hopped on a plane. And maybe they would never have met again, if the challenge of inception hadn't reeled Eames back in. The thought makes Arthur faintly ill.

Mal shushes Eames. "Don't say that. He likes you."

Somewhere outside, there's an explosion.

"_Likes me_, Miles, you're such a liar…"

Arthur's phone rings; the projection of Mal stares sharply at him, but Eames doesn't look up.

He flips the phone open. "What the hell's going on out there?" he demands.

_~"_You're_ the one who wanted us to piss them off!"~_ Ariadne snaps. _~"Yeah, there are squads of armed men all over the place, but Tak had to fold a building up like origami before we got even a twitch out of them, and when I added a holographic billboard they went ballistic. Why—what have _you_ been doing to make them so mad?"~_

He swallows and closes his eyes tightly. When he opens them, the projection of Mal is gone, but Eames is still a wreck on the bathroom floor, water from his face dripping down to wet his shirt (a dark shape peeks through the moist fabric, and Arthur realizes he never knew Eames had tattoos).

Arthur thinks this moment would make a stunning photograph. Unbidden, the phrase _beautiful mess_ pops into his head.

"Might as well tell her the truth," someone tells Arthur in his own voice.

He spins to see a projection of himself standing by the window in flannel pants and an old ROTC shirt, hair sleep-mussed and glasses perched on his nose.

The projection gestures to the phone. "She's waiting for an answer, isn't she? You must be _Arthur_. It's so nice to finally meet you."

"I was trying direct contact with the subject," Arthur says.

_~"Then why are they coming after us instead of you?"~_ yelps Ariadne.

"Because," says the projection of Arthur, raising a book of Yeats and turning the page. "You—_we_—are welcome here. A little fluffy and sickeningly romantic, isn't it? _Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths_…"

"So why doesn't he notice that I'm here?" Arthur asks, forgetting about Ariadne.

The projection nods toward the bathroom. "He's a little busy wallowing in grief at the moment. _Boo-fucking-hoo_, I know, but what can you do? And did it ever occur to you that he might _expect_ to see you here? Not a bit out of place among all his most guarded thoughts and secrets. I did mention 'sickeningly romantic.' Maybe 'cute but incredibly pathetic' would be more accurate. Like a…a wet kitten. I dunno, I look at something like that, and it makes me smile, and then I just wanna…" The projection makes a vague grasping motion, as though searching for words.

The pause draws on, and Arthur doesn't want to know, _doesn'twanttoknow_…

"…crush its adorable little skull," the projection finishes brightly.

Arthur stares at that smile—his _own_ smile—and feels a little thrill of fear.

He knows what this is.

Eames hasn't been extracting quite as long as Arthur and Dom, but he's worked more jobs overall (_used_ more, and probably of varying quality, not just Somnacin, but Somnasol and Oneirol and God knows what else). And while Dom's shade of Mal appeared after her death, Eames' shade of Arthur must have appeared _before_ that. By their very nature, shades only get stronger the longer they're around, right up until their sudden dissipation via catharsis.

Professor Miles' theories extrapolated that a powerful enough shade could take control of a shared dream, could change things, could fuck with the rules and not care (because it's not like the subject's sub cons can do any real harm to a fellow projection).

Fuck. That. Shit.

Arthur has never had control of a dream taken from him, and he's not about to let some fucking creepy-ass mirror-world copy of himself do what even the strongest-willed militarized marks haven't managed (nevermind the aforementioned record-breaking level of imaginative violence associated with Eames' subconscious).

There's another explosion, closer this time, shaking the building and causing Arthur to drop his phone as he stumbles to keep his balance.

The thud of the cell phone on the carpet startles Eames, and he scrambles to his feet. "Arthur!" he says, turning to splash more water on his face. "I didn't hear you come in, darling. I was just washing up again before the—before we go."

Arthur's practical side tells him that he either needs to wake Eames up or draw attention away from the others before they get torn limb-from-limb (or before the shade decides to get violent). "Do you remember how you got here?"

Eames pauses, turns off the faucet. "What sort of a question is that?" he asks as he dries his face on a hand towel.

"Do you think you're awake right now?"

Slowly, Eames turns. "I always know when I'm dreaming," he asserts.

"He does," the projection of Arthur says helpfully. "It's one of his few redeeming qualities."

The presence of more than one Arthur doesn't seem to bother Eames.

"Who were you talking to a moment ago?" Arthur presses.

"M—Mal," Eames replies, tripping briefly over her maiden name before settling on the name everyone else called her.

"But we're late for her funeral right now."

"I never claimed sanity, darling."

They stand there, at opposite ends of the hotel room, Arthur dressed for work while the projection stands beside him in pajamas, Eames backed against the bathroom counter as if in self-defense while damp fabric shows curls and points of writing under his collarbone.

There he is again, the Eames of photographs: young and sad and far-away.

More explosions rumble in the distance. On the floor, the dropped phone carries the thin sound of Ariadne's screams.

The shade looks down at it as if it's the funniest thing he's seen all day.

Arthur taps his gun against the book of Yeats in the shade's hand. "Why are there two of me?"

A frown furrows Eames' brow. "Two of you?"

"Two of us," the shade agrees unconcernedly. "Though what you see in a stick-in-the-mud like him, I've no idea. I'm far more interesting. Unless, of course, the point is the juxtaposition."

"Don't make me shoot you," Arthur warns the shade.

"But you haveta admit, Arthur, there's quite a bit of innuendo to the situation. Twin fantasy? I'd fuck you for a laugh, princess."

"You're disgusting," mutters Arthur. To Eames he says, "Where's your totem?"

Finally, the explosions surround them. Finally, the city outside the window is ablaze. Finally, a black-clad army marches through the streets.

The dream is still stable. Arthur's dreams are always stable. Arthur can have a gut full of lead while staring down a panicking mark and keep a dream stable.

"I always know when I'm dreaming," Eames says again, shakily, gripping the counter behind him with white-knuckled fingers.

"Mm-hm-hm," the shade of Arthur chuckles. "_Puh_-thetic."

Arthur glares, but doesn't dignify the interruption with a verbal response. "Please don't tell me you're enough of an egotist to have been extracting all these years _without a totem_."

"Now, that's just rude," says the shade, turning the page again. "But yes, he is useless enough to do something that fucking imbecilic. You and I should compare notes sometime, sweetheart, you might find we agree on a _lotta_ things."

"Shut up," Arthur grunts, and shoots the annoying projection. "God, what an obnoxious _prick_. Eames, check your damn totem."

Annoyance flits over Eames' face, and he shoves his hand into his pocket. He pales, eyes wide with shock. "What did he say to you?" he whispers. "_What did you tell him_?"

The stark fear there is scalding. What reason is there for Eames to turn that look on _him_ and not the shade? They're going to talk about this. They're going to talk about this in real life, in Arthur's hotel room, where that smug figment can't butt in.

Arthur turns his glock on Eames. "Time to wake up, Mr. Eames."

**.End.**


	31. Purgatory

do you see the crap Cobb has to put up with? it's like running a kindergarten full of international white-collar thieves.

i kept waffling over whether to split this in half or keep it together. *shrug*

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya. taking liberties with how the characters met/how long they've known each other. mild violence, craziness. language: pg-13 (for use of s***, f***, and g**damn).

**pairing:** some Arthur/Eames.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; later in the same day as **Interim**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) the L'Ermitage Beverly Hills is a great five-star hotel on Rodeo Drive. 2) the Sakaki Extraction was the job they did in Toukyou with Saja. 3) high fever is capable of cooking your internal organs. after the patient hits about 105F with no sign of the fever falling, the next measure is an ice bath. 4) Tak encapsulated Artie in **Chaining the Serpent** (**Papillon**). 5) the Miyako Downtown is a nice but fairly cheap hotel in the Little Tokyo area. it's technically only like a three-star hotel, but it's nice and in a great neighborhood. 6) Stephen Miles is the official full name of Mal's father. 7) Nairobi is the capital of Kenya, situated on the edge of a big stretch of forest in the western (inland) half of the country. 8) "The Gates of Janus" is a book about serial killers and serial killing, written by Ian Brady, a British whacko who committed the Moors Murders in the 60s. 9) Glock 17 = super-reliable semi-automatic pistol. 10) "hullo" = hello; "poppet" = child, little one.

* * *

><p><strong>Purgatory (I Know the Way)<strong>

Dom was in a cab, five minutes from the L'Ermitage Beverly Hills, when his phone rang.

Ariadne was frantic, Yusuf was babbling. Tak took the phone from them and explained the situation in a firm, calm tone. Good little yakuza daughter, cold as ice while the world explodes around her.

Dom's ears caught the phrases _demilitarizing agent_ and _unexpected side effect_ and _dropped a level_, and he hung up angrily.

The first words out of his mouth when he storms into Arthur's hotel room are, "I told you to fucking _wait for me_!"

Yusuf is digging through little vials of chemicals on the coffee table. Ariadne is watching him and wiping her face. Tak shuts the door behind Dom and holds out a box of tissues to Ariadne.

Arthur comes out of the bedroom, and Dom can tell he's ready for a scolding; his face is pale and his eyes are trained on the ceiling.

"Arthur," Dom says sharply. "Did I or did I not specifically tell you not to test any of the demilitarization mixtures without me?"

"We were done with everything else," Arthur says, calm as ever.

Jesus. In a hail of bullets, Arthur would still be just as calm as ever. He'd fit right in with Saito's people.

"Oh, you were _done_, and you thought you'd work ahead in the book to try and impress the teacher, is that it?" Dom bites out.

"He's the one who said there was no harm in starting early."

Dom is sorely tempted to punch Arthur in the face. "And Eames is always such a great judge of what is and isn't a good idea!" he snaps.

Arthur's eyes move right, left (indulgent impatience). "I didn't actually expect the drug to work, and certainly not the way it did."

Rubbing a hand over his face, Dom takes a seat at the coffee table, across from Yusuf. "Explain to me how you managed to _accidentally_ drop a highly trained, highly experienced, highly militarized subject into Limbo from the _first level_. When I specifically told you not to run the tests without me, I also specifically told you not to use sedation—did you ignore that part, too?"

"We didn't!" Yusuf yelps. "I didn't add any kind of sedative at all, Arthur swore up and down his dream would be stable without it, I can't think how this could've happened, unless the ratio should've been closer to—"

"That's enough," Tak says, and Yusuf subsides. "The dream _was_ stable. And the sub cons were ridiculously docile. I literally folded a building into a crane and only had them turning to look. Arthur said he was with Mr. Eames, trying to see if direct contact would trigger a reaction."

Dom inhales sharply and looks at Arthur, who seems to be busy with his cufflinks (yellow diamonds that Dom remembers from the Sakaki job). Arthur rarely avoids eye contact, and almost never fidgets, so Dom starts to wonder whether this is (could _possibly_ be) worse than he thinks. "I'm still waiting for that explanation. What was the secure location?"

"It was supposed to be a prison," Arthur says softly. "Eames is a thief, so things like safes and bank vaults don't register as secure locations in his subconscious. There's no way he would populate them. When I looked out the window, the view was right, but the room was from a hotel…a memory."

Frowning, Dom starts categorizing the information, trying to make sense of what happened and what went wrong. Populating the secure location with a memory is completely normal, so the snag didn't come from that. "How did you get in?"

"I don't know, so I must've entered the dream there."

"From inside the secure location?" Dom asks, looking up. "I've only seen that happen in certain very specific cases." Cases where the person in question was considered implicitly trusted by the subject. Cases where the person in question was treasured enough to be something the subject's subconscious wanted to protect. Once, Dom accidentally entered a secure part of Mal's subconscious in the same way.

Arthur's ears are turning pink at the tips (Mal always said it was the first warning sign he was about to blush). "I'm sure I don't know," he says, and it rings just true enough that Dom thinks Arthur knows but didn't expect it.

"Within the memory, were there any anomalous projections—subconscious bodyguards of some kind?"

"Yes." Arthur hesitates for a moment. "One was a comfort figure—Mal."

Dom reflexively tenses at the sound of his wife's name. But of course she would be benign and nostalgic within Eames' subconscious, since they'd known each other so long.

"The other…" Arthur goes on, and clenches his jaw. His left eyebrow twitches (annoyance). "A projection of me."

Aha. The presence of the projection inside the secure area is informative on its own; the fact that Arthur seems to have disliked it is _more_ informative. "A projection of you," Dom says. "Did it talk to you?"

Arthur snorts. "Unfortunately, yes. Didn't say anything relevant."

Dom doubts that, but there are other, faster ways of getting information than trying to get Arthur to talk about things that he doesn't want to talk about. "Did the dream collapse?"

"No."

"How and in what order did you drop out?"

Ariadne hiccups. "Soldiers," she quavers. "They used gas. We could barely breathe. Someone fired a rocket, and glass was raining from the sky. Tak said, 'Fuck it,' and then I woke up."

"I figured if they were already pissed, it wouldn't hurt to dream a gun into my hand," Tak explains. "They kept coming, so I had to have been next. Gun to the head."

If the dream never collapsed, Arthur has to have been the last one out. Dom clenches his hands together. Arthur's still holding something back.

"Arthur, that 'direct contact' attempt of yours…?"

He notices that Arthur still won't meet his gaze. "Routine attention-grab," the point man says brusquely. "I asked him if he remembered how he'd gotten there. I pointed out the fact that he'd been talking to Mal when we were running late for her funeral. I pointed out the fact that I was standing next to myself. And then when I asked where his totem was, the place went blitzkrieg on us."

Yusuf stands up and gestures expansively. "And see, it shouldn't have! The reaction shouldn't have been so abrupt under the effects of the demilitarizing agent, it should have been gradual and uncoordinated, so there must have been a reaction between—"

"That's enough," Tak says again, and Yusuf sits down.

"And then what?" Dom prompts.

Arthur flinches.

"Sub security mobilized, Arthur, but what did _Eames_ do?"

"He told me he always knows when he's dreaming, and th—that _insufferable_ goddamn _know-it-all_ agreed with him…" Arthur sneers, fingers still fumbling at his left cufflink (not fastening or unfastening, Dom notices, just worrying at the bright golden surface). "I told him to check his totem—I said, 'Please tell me you aren't enough of an egotist to have been extracting all these years without a totem,' and the _thing_ said I was being rude, and I _lost it_. Okay? Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to hear? An obnoxious projection of _me_ annoyed me _so much_ that I blew his stupid imaginary brains out all over the wall."

Not enough, on its own, to scatter the mind of a man like Eames. Shake him, maybe…but not send his subconscious fleeing, no matter what interesting effects the new mixture had.

"And then what?" Dom repeats.

Arthur flinches again.

"Between shooting a projection of yourself in front of him inside the most secure corners of his mind and trying to wake him up, _what happened_?" Dom presses.

"Nothing," Arthur says evasively. His shoulders hitch up asymmetrically (guilt?). "Nothing important."

"And yet our forger is comatose in the next room," Dom retorts. "You're good, Arthur, you're _very_ good, but when things go wrong, when the unexpected happens, he's _better_. From a professional standpoint, we can't afford the loss."

Arthur bristles like an angry cat, shoulders back and dark eyes flashing as he finally makes eye contact. "'From a professional standpoint.' Why not make the guilt trip complete and remind me that this little misadventure could turn Mal's oldest and best friend into a walking vegetable?"

Yes, that's the real reason Dom is so pissed off. He doesn't like having his commands disobeyed, he doesn't like things going wrong, but he can't forgive the dangerous chance that he'll lose another part of Mal to dreaming. Dom doesn't want to go home and feel like he's failed Mal again.

He rolls his eyes. "Because guilt trips never produce a useful effect on you. How long has he been in Limbo by now?"

Suddenly, Arthur looks ashamed, hunted. "Five min—six minutes, I think. Out here. God knows how long in there. The fever's rising faster than it should; we've got maybe another three to five before we need to ice him, and if he's not out of Limbo by then, the kick…"

"…will pull up whatever happens to be ready to go at the time," Dom finishes.

Arthur swallows thickly and continues in a low voice. "He put his hand in his pocket—he must have been checking his totem. He looked at me like he was terrified of me. He said, 'What did he say to you? What did you tell him?' After all of it, after everything else in there, I c—I couldn't stand the look on his face. So I shot him. And then I shot myself. I woke up, he didn't."

Either the memory had something to do with Arthur, or Eames said something to a projection that did. It's the only thing that explains both Arthur's lack of composure and Eames' retreat deeper into his own subconscious. That's the big problem with not sorting out relationship issues before entering a dream. And it's the big problem with trying to keep secrets in a group of people who steal secrets for a living.

"It gets worse," Arthur blurts, as if he'd still been thinking of holding something back.

"There's only one way I can think of for that to be possible," Dom says dryly.

"He wasn't normal. The projection of me. Normal projections don't act like that, don't talk like that. Normal projections don't have that kind of possessive sadism."

Dom groans. Yes, that was the only way he could think of for things to be worse. "Could you tell how old it was? How strong?"

"Two or three years, I think. And I don't know how strong."

"Five," Tak says.

Arthur looks like he wants to hit her. "You _knew_ about that thing? And you never said anything?"

She raises an eyebrow. "I locked 'that thing' up without you or anyone else ever even noticing, and he'd probably still _be_ locked up if not for the combination of your choosing a prison for the secure area and the fever from Yusuf's demilitarizing compound."

A _five-year-old_ shade. That's what Eames encapsulated on the Sakaki extraction. And Arthur's prison undid the whole thing.

Arthur is coming apart, wavering between anger and panic. The closest Dom's ever seen Arthur to something like panic was when he found out they were risking Limbo on the Fischer job.

Arthur paces fitfully, two steps left, three right. He stops and puts his hands on his hips, leans down to look Tak in the eye. "You risked an encapsulation during a _job_ without telling your _point man_? Exactly how did that strike you as an intelligent thing to do?"

"It wasn't a problem," she shoots back crisply. "In fact, it was _preventing_ a problem. I did what I had to do to make sure my first job went off without a hitch as far as my uncle was concerned. And don't go pointing fingers when 'that _thing_' has been wearing _your_ face for five years."

"Jesus," Dom huffs.

Five years. Enough for the shade to be able to break into whatever shared dreams it likes. Enough for it to be able to alter the construction of a dream. Enough for it to fight like Eames personally trained it. Maybe enough for it to pull Eames into Limbo. Maybe enough for it to be able to whisper a word and have Eames turn on them. In Limbo, it could be a fucking nightmare. Better make it fast.

"So now you know," says Arthur. "So what do we do?"

Dom sighs and gets out of his chair. "We go get our forger back."

"But how do we get that deep without ge—" Arthur starts to protest.

"I know the way," Dom reminds him. "You just start us where you left off."

Once Yusuf has been calmed down enough to sedate them without killing them, they settle and hook in.

A room at the Miyako Downtown. The place is oppressively quiet. Near the window is a crumpled form Dom quickly identifies as the shade of Arthur (and how curious it is, that Arthur would reproduce the dead projection…). In the bathroom, Eames is slumped next to the sink in his best suit, damp patches on his shirt and blood tracing a line from a neat bullet hole in his forehead.

Dom sets down the PASIV case that Arthur dreamed into his hands.

Arthur is staring at the imagined corpse of Eames.

"Arthur," Dom says gently. "Let's go get him."

Limbo always begins underwater, in darkness.

They surface near the crumbling remains of the city Dom and Mal built. Ahead of them is a clumsy patchwork smattering, the security-blanket sort of things that an untrained dreamer comes up with on the upper levels. The beach turns into an urban riverbank, some half-familiar segment of the Nile, but majestic footbridges and whitewashed buildings run up against a dust-colored Mombasa marketplace, which in turn becomes part of a British suburb. Yes, Eames has been here.

"Jesus," Arthur gulps, still streaming chilly saltwater as he stumbles over the beach to stand beside Dom. "This is what it's like? Where do we even start?"

With something treasured, Dom thinks, but doesn't say it.

Lost in Limbo, the first instinct is to create someone or something that brings comfort. Since the locations are disjointed, Dom assumes it is a person. He scans the nearby area for projections. The place is abandoned but for one figure.

He sees Stephen sitting outside a café by the river, drawing something with Doric columns.

Arthur's steps are squishy and unsteady as he starts forward. "Professor Miles?"

Stephen holds up a finger, finishes a curled grape leaf, sets his pencil down. "Dom," he says. "Arthur. How can I help you lads today?"

"Have you seen Eames?" Dom asks before Arthur can say anything.

"Not in a long while," Stephen says sadly. "Though I don't suppose that surprises you. He moved through quite quickly…as if he were running from someone…or _to_ someone."

That's something Dom understands. Once upon a time, he would have done the same to chase Mal's shade. Obsession does that…makes it so that, even knowing the projection isn't the real thing, you still find it precious.

"Hunting dragons, perhaps," Miles says with a fleeting grin.

Dom blinks. He hadn't thought of _that_ possibility…that Eames may have chased his shade to Limbo in an attempt to vanquish it.

Arthur looks confused.

"Thank you," Dom says, and has to drag Arthur by the arm like a listless child.

They wander through the jigsaw city. There is no other sign of life—not even birds. The city forms a fairly narrow corridor, flimsy and only partially constructed, like an old Wild West movie set. Again, the chaotic, shoddily made dreaming of someone untrained or unfocused. On a footbridge in Paris (they can smell the Seine, can see a false Eiffel Tower), Mal sits on a bench with a sketchpad in her hands—she's making a maze.

"Dom," she says, just like her father did. "Arthur."

"Hello, Mal," Dom says, and she smiles at him. Eames' subconscious has made a better approximation of her smile than Dom's did (a little less idealized, a little more asymmetrical). "We're looking for Sean."

Her smile turns sad at the edges. "You've come very late," she tells them. "Years and years too late. He's young again, and doesn't listen well, except to _him_."

Dom's stomach drops. Mal's foreboding 'him' is certainly the shade of Arthur. In Limbo, shades can be gods. Eames' shade of Arthur may be as vicious and inventive as Dom's shade of Mal. After all this time, he may be _worse_.

"Him," Arthur says tremulously. "Who?"

Mal looks at him with accusing eyes. "The one who looks like you, Arthur. And it's your own fault for being so silly for so long, you _coward_."

Arthur falls to his knees in front of Mal and takes her hands. "I know I'm a coward, Mal, I _know_, but I have to find him. You know where we are, you know what could happen if we leave him here too long. I can't leave him with that—that _thing_."

"I told you already—you're late," she says, but points along the footbridge. "Keep going, if you really care so much. But be very careful. You can't know just how cruel he imagines you."

Arthur gets up and stumbles forward with shocking eagerness. It's possible his conscious panic is translating into subconscious single-mindedness…a dangerous thing.

Dom frowns after him for a moment before following.

They're in Nairobi now, in one of the quieter areas. One of the apartment buildings is blatantly out of place, an eight-story affair amid squat two- and three-floor buildings.

"My apartm—" Arthur starts to say, but trails off and starts to sprint.

"Arthur, _wait_!" Dom calls, running after.

The front door of the building leads jarringly into the fourth floor hallway. Arthur is fumbling with his key by the time Dom makes it to his side.

"Well, now, fancy meeting you here," the _other_ Arthur drawls from an armchair. Like the corpse in the dream above, he's wearing loose flannel pants and a worn tee. He's got his glasses on, and is reading a book—The Gates of Janus. Dom frowns, but he doubts Arthur recognizes the title, or the book's significance. The book is a symbol of how the shade thinks, some visual reminder of what it's learning, of the traits Eames has given it. Smart. Cruel. Possibly psychotic.

"What are you doing here?" Arthur demands.

The projection smiles. "That's a pretty stupid question. I—and technically _you_—live here, Arthur." He leans back a little. "And I was here first. Strange that he remembers us best like this, all from a glimpse. A knock on the door…which you answered with a gun behind your back, _yes_, he noticed. Polished oak flooring. A leather recliner and ottoman in the background, a little table with a lamp, a steaming mug of coffee, a book."

Arthur's hands are clenching, and Dom watches him—both of him—carefully.

"He could imagine you so perfectly," the projection goes on. "Sitting there, pale feet propped up, reading…maybe the gun was just beside the coffee, and you picked it up with one hand while you set down the book with the other. And all at once, he realized he'd met you _before_ the Bennett kidnapping extraction. That pretty, skinny friend of Dom and Mal's he thought he'd never see again. He felt like someone—God, or whoever—had given him a present." He chuckles. "Pathetic."

"Where is he?" Arthur growls, reaching for his gun. "Where is he, what have you done with him?"

"Oh, calm down," sniffs the shade, disdainfully. "It's been ages since I had to do a damn thing to him. Sean will be home from school any minute now. Dom, would you like some tea? It's fresh. I always have a fresh pot waiting when Sean gets back. He settles down at my feet like a puppy and tells me all about his day and the idiotic problems of a typical teenage boy, and all I have to do is nod and smile, and he _worships_ me. _Pathetic_."

Dom edges cautiously into the apartment, sees Arthur pull his Glock at the same moment the shade raises one of his own.

"Stop it, _stop_, stop _calling_ him that, you piece of shit!" Arthur spits.

"No call to be rude—_again_," the shade says. "It'll take more than bullets to stop me, Arthur, you _know_ that. But that's why we're all here, isn't it? He heard me whispering and went running along after me."

"I hate you!" Arthur shouts. "God, I hate you! Just _shut up_!"

"Arthur," Dom says urgently. "Calm down. Be careful. Remember: one wrong move and he wakes up with _nothing_." One wrong move and they get bounced again and again, wasting time until Eames' brain simmers into soup or Tak takes matters into her competent little hands and dumps him into a bathtub full of ice.

The shade laughs when Arthur reluctantly lowers his weapon. "The girl was _so_ much more of a challenge," he tsks. "She knew my tricks and wouldn't play along. And I'm secure enough to admit that she beat the shit outta me. I learned a lot, and I had really hoped I'd get the chance to use some of it on you, princess. But you're just gonna roll over and _take it_, aren't you?"

Footsteps sound in the hall, and Dom turns.

"Artie, you won't _believe_ the essay I've got to write," Eames says as he opens the door.

Dom never knew Eames this young. The forger looks about sixteen, dressed in what Dom recognizes from photographs as his Eton uniform. His skin is tanned and his hair is sun-bleached to the color of raw honey.

"Oh," Eames says with a charming smile. "Hullo. Didn't know we had guests."

"It's no one important," says the shade.

Accordingly, Eames glances once more at each of them before forgetting about them entirely.

Arthur's gun makes a hollow noise when it hits the floor.

"I shall _absolutely_ require your assistance, darling," Eames goes on, dropping a book bag near the ottoman. When he leans down and kisses the shade's cheek, Arthur makes a half-stifled noise.

"Of course," the shade says. "After all, your spelling is atrocious."

Eames straightens and tosses his blazer over a chair. "What do I need to learn to spell for? I've got you, darling, and you're _brilliant_."

"No," says Arthur. "No, he's not me. He's _not me_. He's a fake. He's just a projection."

Slowly, Eames blinks. "I'm…sorry," he says haltingly. "Haven't we met somewhere before? Only I've the strangest feeling that we know each other…"

"Of course we do, of course we know each other." Arthur's voice sounds thready and desperate, and Dom worries that he might already be getting lost. "It's _me_, it's _Arthur_. Clarke, like…like the writer. You call me 'darling' and 'dear,' and I'm pretty sure it's because you like the face I make when I tell you not to. You kiss my cheek, always in the same place, and I keep telling you that someday I'm gonna hit you for it, but I haven't, not in all the years we've known each other."

"Don't mind them, Sean," the shade says. "Go get the tea; it's by the stove."

"God, shut up, _shut up_!" shouts Arthur. "I hate you! I hate you so much!"

Dom slowly moves his hand toward his own gun.

The shade grins in triumph. "I _am_ you."

Arthur lets out a hoarse sob, and Dom thinks they may have to back out and let Arthur calm down before they can try again. "No, you're _not_."

Eames hesitates, looking from Arthur to the shade and back. "Artie, dear, why've you got a gun?"

"You're so stupid," the shade tells Arthur, standing up. "So stupid and selfish and cowardly. You made Mal a liar. She said you didn't mean to be cruel, but you _did_. You _do_. She said that one day you'd wake up and stop being silly about it, but you haven't." He comes closer, gaze locking for a moment with Dom's, and Dom can see a coldness there that sends chills up his spine.

_You can't know just how cruel he imagines you._

"I don't mean to!" Arthur protests. "And I did wake up! I'm awake right now."

"Don't say that," Dom interjects. "Arthur, remember why we're here. Don't get confused."

Arthur looks at him, blinks in sudden tranquil clarity.

The shade presses the barrel of his gun to Arthur's forehead. "You don't deserve him," he says tonelessly.

"Maybe not…"

Dom watches carefully, waits. If the shade shoots Arthur, Dom will have to go back up and get him.

"Maybe not," Arthur says again. "But I love him, which is more than _you_ can say. You don't even _exist_, you _impostor_. Mr. Eames, can you tell me how you got here?"

"I," says Eames, swallowing. "I took…the bus…from…"

"From Eton, in England, through Nairobi to my apartment in Los Angeles?" Arthur finishes. "And how can I be taking care of you like this? You're three years older than I am, and we didn't meet until Mal was pregnant and you came to the States to help them move. He calls you Sean, but that's not your real name, it's not what you'd be calling yourself at this age, and it's certainly not something _I've_ ever called you."

"I'm dreaming," Eames breathes in bewilderment. "I'm dreaming? This is a dream? Why don't you wake me up, then?"

"Eames, we're in Limbo. You have to _want_ to come back. Please come back."

"He doesn't want to go back with you," the shade dismisses. "How could he ever want to go back with you? I'm the one who's been here for him—will _always_ be here for him. I can give him everything he ever dreamed of."

Dom takes a deep breath, uses the fact that the shade is focused on Arthur to make a tiny change.

Arthur's gun is at Eames' feet now, and he picks it up like he's never held one in his life.

"Please come back, Eames," Arthur begs. "I need you. Who'll tease me, if you don't come back? Who'll pester me while I'm working? Who'll slap my ass and tell me to thank my tailor?"

Dom shakes his head and rolls his eyes (he happens to remember the incident, and the fact that Arthur promptly blackened Eames' eye in retaliation, Mal laughing the whole time).

"You can be so incredibly tiresome, Arthur," sighs the shade, slowly squeezing the trigger. "I'll tellya what—I'm in a generous mood right now, so I'll go ahead and make this quick for you, just this once. Next time you come butting your way in, we'll be spending a few _days_ together."

Two guns fire. One body falls.

Arthur's ear is bleeding, and he presses a hand to it while he stares down at the temporarily 'killed' projection.

"Darling, I've just shot you to save you from yourself," Eames mumbles, hands shaking. "What sort of sense does that make?"

"What?" Arthur asks loudly, turning his head.

"Deafened by the shot," Dom explains with a wry grin.

"Couldn't you have shot that loudmouth bastard half a second sooner?" Arthur complains.

Eames awkwardly holds Arthur's gun out. "Can we go home now? Only, I've been here a long time, I think. Also, I have a very clear recollection of you saying you love me, and I plan to blackmail you to the fullest extent."

"_What_?" Arthur says again, a little louder.

"I said you're brilliant and I love you!" Eames lies.

"Great?"

"Oh, for God's sake," Dom sighs.

The moment they wake up, Arthur rushes to Eames' side.

"Please be awake, please be awake," he whispers.

"Good morning, darling," Eames says with the audacious tone of someone who knows he's made people worry and is proud of it. "Have I missed anything fun?"

"You son of a bitch, you _stupid_—" Arthur laughs (or maybe sobs).

Ariadne interrupts them by launching herself at Eames and hugging him half to death.

"Oof—hullo, poppet…"

"We were so worried!" she cries, voice squeaky with tears. "When you didn't wake up, we thought—we thought—"

"I know you did."

"You were out seven minutes and forty-three seconds longer than the rest of us," Tak informs Eames after a look at her phone.

"How long was it on the inside?" Yusuf eagerly asks.

"Years," Eames says. A thoughtful crease appears between his brows. "Years and years…"

"I know the feeling," Dom says, and pats Eames' shoulder.

"Aren't you going to check your totem?" asks Ariadne.

"I always know when I'm dreaming," Eames dismisses. "Though there's one good way to be sure…" He yanks Arthur down by the tie and kisses him soundly.

Arthur jerks backward and punches Eames—but Dom sees the telltale flush of pink on Arthur's ears. "You just wrinkled an eight hundred dollar tie, asshole," he mutters.

"Yes," Eames grunts, smiling and rubbing at his already-bruising cheek. "Definitely awake."

**.End.**


	32. David

i have no idea where i'm going with this. this should come as no surprise to most of you. lllllaaaaawwwwwlllll.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (Saito's niece). minor crossovers. language: pg.

**pairing:** a little background Arthur/Eames, some cute Ariadne/Yusuf.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; day after **Interim** and **Purgatory**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) the title's a reference to the biblical story of David and Goliath. all you need to know is that Goliath was a big meanie-head and David was a young boy who had a slingshot and very good aim. 2) once again, the Wonderland watch. if it really existed, i would love it to bits (and never be able to tell time on it). 3) "and the mome raths outgrabe" is a line from the poem Jabberwocky, which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice in _Through the Looking Glass_. 4) all you need to know about 'the Matheson job' is what the boys have said here. which is all i know about it, too. 5) you've gotten a few peeks at the building blocks of synergistic architecture, but not the mechanics or how it would actually be put into practice-that's coming soon. 6) again the Breakfast at Tiffany's running reference. 7) Triad are Chinese gangsters (similar to the yakuza). the original Triads were a group of secret societies formed to resist Manchu rule during the Qing dynasty (they wanted to return to rule by the Han), and were dubbed 'triads' by the British because their emblem was a triangle. 8) Tahir is a fairly common Arabic name (both given and surname). 9) Victoriaaaaaa. she totally did some contract work for Saito at some point. i can just see her in go-go boots and a smart little miniskirt... 10) 'snicker-snack' is apparently the noise made by a vorpal sword (according to the poem Jabberwocky-"one-two, one-two, and through and through the vorpal blade went snicker-snack"). Lewis Carroll made no real explanation of what 'vorpal' means, but in popular culture, a vorpal item has the power to destroy even a powerful enemy in one blow. 11) "uppish" means snobby. 12) the one-a-day rule-in this happy little fanfic series, Arthur smokes exactly one cigarette a day.

* * *

><strong>David<strong>

Arthur watches the inconsistent spin of watch-hands, listens to the ticking briefly change speeds to match. A ponderous _tik…tik…tok_, speeding up into _tiktik, tok, tiktik, tok,_ and then up into _tiktiktiktiktik_ like the clicking of a card in the spokes of a kid's bike. It's hypnotic. Sometimes when he's been staring at his watch too long, he thinks he sees the numbers move.

And the mome raths outgrabe.

He shuts the watch, puts it back in his pocket, returns to his typing.

Five minutes later (by the cold and consistent numbers in the corner of the laptop screen), he leans back slightly in his chair and speaks. "Saito's got another job lined up for us, if you're feeling up to it."

Eames stirs from his place by the window. "Hm?"

Arthur finishes up an email and turns. "Saito. He has another job. Can you work?"

He watches the slow, sleepy drift of Eames' eyelashes as the forger blinks (quashes an urge to go over and pet his hair like a little kid with a cold). "Dunno. Is it looking like hard work? Because I'm not up to anything as hair-raising as the Fischer job."

"Blue Sun Enterprises is running some kind of early behavioral neurosurgery experiments," he says. He controls that squishy, solicitous urge by slipping his hand into his waistcoat pocket and tracing his fingers along the crowded tea-services on the Wonderland watch's front face. "Saito wants to know what they're doing and how advanced it is, in case it threatens any of his investments. We have the name of one of the head scientists."

Eames glances at the couch, where Tak and Ariadne are curled up together, showing off their synergistic architecture to Cobb, who's slumped in an armchair. "Blue Sun. Do you think they're still angry about that work four years back? The Matheson job?"

"Surely they've forgotten all about us," Arthur teases. "Or at least forgiven us for the public humiliation of being caught evading taxes and fines."

"More reasons not to work for the FBI ever again," Eames snorts. "What's the preliminary research turned up?"

Arthur doesn't insult Eames by pretending not to have already done the bulk of the preliminary work before even discussing the job. "Tracing the money was annoyingly laborious, but it turned up some interesting names."

Eames hums agreeably. "Well, they do say one should follow the money."

"They've been receiving funding from Goliath that matches up to spending at a particular secure facility. The facility's locked down tighter than Fort Knox, so the next-best thing is to hit the head researcher. We'll case the house as a last resort, but it looks like it'll be easier to get him somewhere between home and work."

"Goliath. Well, the bloke'll definitely have sub security, then. What's the word on the demilitarisation compound?"

"No word yet," Arthur replies. "And we're not testing it on you again. We'll test it on me, and Cobb's going to be along next time."

"No arguments here," Eames drawls with a lazy grin. "I've learnt my lesson for now. A few decades in Limbo can do wonders for one's level of caution. What's our timeframe?"

"Saito wants it done as soon as possible. A month, tops, so it could be a bit tight. If we turn it down, he'll get another team."

Eames puts a hand to his chest in mock-affront. "And spoil our record with him? Tut! Let's turn our two-for-two into a three-for-three. Tak can handle a militarised mark. If all we've got to do is extract the subject of his research and maybe some of the details, it's all down to planning a decent heist, right? You're aces at that, darling."

Arthur watches closely, but he can't see anything too far out of place on Eames. A little more mussed than usual, perhaps a little more easily distracted. And it's true that if Tak can slap Eames' shade around, she could probably handle all but the very nastiest sub-security. "All right. We'll talk it over with the girls after Cobb goes home. Meanwhile, I think you should have another bottle of water."

"Yes, dear," Eames retorts with a grin.

When Cobb and the girls surface, the older man is smiling proudly. "I knew you two could do it," he says. "I caught four transitions; how many were there?"

"Seven!" Ariadne crows, and gives Tak a high five. "Good enough to fool the master almost half the time. What are the odds of an amateur having the slightest clue?"

Eames clicks his tongue. "As a lifelong gambler, I advise you to never rely on the odds, precious."

Cobb stands and tugs his blazer back on. "I've gotta run, guys; promised James I'd take him to go get ice cream. Keep practicing."

They all watch him leave in silence.

Tak unhooks from the PASIV. "Cat, you look like you're about to fall asleep. I thought Arthur would have ordered some food for you by now."

"Don't fuss, Miss Golightly," says Eames. "Arthur has a job lined up for us, if you ladies are interested."

She stares at him for a moment. "Do you think you're up to it? Mr. Cobb said Limbo is very hard on the body. Fever, fatigue, memory loss, narcolepsy, vertigo…"

"Two more days of heavy sleep will see me right as rain," Eames says somewhat gruffly.

Arthur picks up the room phone. "What would you like for lunch, Mr. Eames?"

Eames pouts like a sullen child. It's silly and far too cute. "What's today's soup?"

"Lobster bisque."

"Ooh, I'll have that, then—"

"No you won't," Arthur contradicts. "You're allergic to shellfish."

Eames grins. "Just testing you, darling."

While he orders a salad and sandwich for Eames, Arthur listens to Ariadne asking for the details of the job. Eames gives his usual colorful answers. Tak doesn't say anything until Arthur hangs up and asks if she has any questions.

"You're aware that even though Blue Sun Enterprises is technically an American corporation, it's owned and run by Triad, right?"

"We have some experience with Blue Sun, yes," Arthur tells her.

She just looks at him for a moment, oddly unreadable before she's back to her usual smug self (she probably expected to shock him with the news). "Well, I might know someone who worked with them in the past and could give a little inside perspective."

"You're not sure if you know this person?" Arthur taunts.

Tak's eyes narrow and she makes a snide little grin. "All right, I _do_ know someone who _might_ be willing to help us. Smartass."

"Are you in?"

"Definitely. Ari?"

Ariadne nods slowly. "Yeah," she says. "Sure. We could work out a pair of synergistic levels. Can we call Yusuf up?"

Arthur arches an eyebrow. "We shouldn't need that many in the field, but a chemist is always helpful when it comes to deciding which sedatives to use on the subject."

"Ari 'n Yusuf, sittin' in a tree," Tak singsongs under her breath, just before Ariadne gives her a sharp and precise elbow to the kidney.

Room service arrives, delivered by a skinny kid with braces—Arthur tips his usual twenty percent, and the kid's eyes bug out just before the door closes in his face. Arthur checks the time (the hedgehog makes a few rapid laps before settling into place) and calls Yusuf.

_~"Tahir Chemists,"~_ Yusuf greets, sounding bored.

"We've got a job lined up with a need for a consultation with a skilled chemist. Interested?"

_~"Could be, could be. Client?"~_

"Saito."

_~"Ooh, lucre. Subject?"~_

"Blue Sun."

_~"Dodgy. I won't go into the field for it."~_

"I wouldn't ask you to."

Whatever Yusuf goes on to say is lost when Arthur realizes that Eames and Tak are talking about her contact. His ear catches on the phrase 'lovely British agent named Victoria,' and he sees Eames go perfectly still.

And then Eames starts to fidget with his salad fork. "Victoria. Lovely old British name, that. Young and pretty, is she?"

"Hm…fifties, maybe? She did a lot of work for my uncle. He showed me a photograph of them from sometime in the seventies—she was gorgeous."

And, "Oh, how terribly nostalgic," says Eames, but it sounds off, somehow. "Reminds me of my own dear mum…ah, those were the days." He takes out his wallet to show her something.

Tak says, "What a sweet little family! You have her smile."

It nags at Arthur for some reason, like the two forgers are communicating in some kind of liars' code, but by then Yusuf is complaining that Arthur's stopped listening. "Sorry, what?" he says.

_~"I said mail me the list of your needs, and I'll have it shipped. Unless you need it urgently…?"~_

"Overnight it, please."

_~"Right. I'll bill you."~_

Ariadne waves frantically.

"Actually, if you could bring it in person, that'd be better," Arthur hastily corrects. "Just in case it turns out we need the mixture adjusted after we observe the subject. You could keep Ariadne out of trouble for me."

_~"Oh. Yes, of course,"~_ Yusuf says in a slightly squeaky tone. _~"High-security target like this, we wanna be absolutely certain of our mixture. And, uh. And architects have a bad habit of finding trouble, to my experience."~_

"Text me when you land, and I'll give you the room number."

When Arthur hangs up, Ariadne does a little victory dance.

"They're so cute at that age," Tak teases.

"Bite me," says Ariadne.

Tak waves a hand. "No time. Gotta set up a meet with my contact. I'll phone if I'm not going to be back for dinner. Cat, you could come with, if you like…meet yourself a nice old British lady."

"Oh, I'll stay in and rest, I think…"

Reflexively, Arthur checks the time (ah, back to obsessively consulting the watch…). The Cheshire Cat is just beginning to grin, and the words of dedication glitter as a sudden breeze stirs the curtains. If Tak thinks she'll be able to make a round trip with a short conversation but _not_ a round trip with a _long_ conversation, and assuming that it'll take an hour to set up the meet, that puts the range outside the city proper. She won't tell if he asks—if she was planning to give the information away for free, she wouldn't be heaping on the vague talk.

After nine of the Wonderland watch's skipping little three-part ticks, Arthur closes the watch and decides to let the matter drop entirely. It's unprofessional to go nosing around in other people's business contacts without being invited.

"We should call it 'the David job,'" Eames says around a piece of lettuce.

Ariadne shakes her head. "No, we can't, not without some cool little trick we can codename 'slingshot.'"

Arthur finds himself wondering whether David's slingshot went 'snicker-snack.' Then he wonders if workplace stress has started to catch up with him.

"Really?" Tak says, unimpressed. "David and Goliath? Slingshot? That's the best you've got?"

Eames snickers. "Ooh, listen to her, getting all uppish with us. Don't hear you contributing titling ideas, Miss Golightly."

"We could use a slingshot as the sign for our shortcuts," Ariadne says.

"Now we're getting somewhere."

Tak blows a raspberry. "No way, you two are pathetic."

Arthur opens his watch again and seriously contemplates breaking his one-a-day rule as the flamingo swings back and forth like a pendulum.

"I'll show you how awesome slingshots are—I'll draw one on your forehead. C'mon, Eames, let's get her!"

"Ari, put that marker down! Mister Eames, don't you dare!"

One-two, one-two, and through-and-through.

This must be what running a kindergarten is like.

**.End.**


	33. Bunny

one of five or six different versions of the meet between Tak and Victoria. there was also a version where Eames went with her, but i felt like that didn't mesh with the way he talks about Victoria to Arthur in **Exorcism Is Effortless**.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya (Saito's niece). crossover with RED. old people in love. language: pg.

**pairing:** sicky-sweet Ivan/Victoria.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; a couple of hours after **David**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters. RED is a DC property.

**notes:** 1) first, it's probably necessary to explain that Russians have a very intricate system of pet name conventions to convey just how much they like you. it's seriously as complex and full of landmines as the Japanese honorific system. "zaichik moi" means "my bunny," and is a rather syrupy specimen of Russian pet name, along the same order of schmoop as, say "snuggle-pie." 2) Christian Louboutin designs insanely expensive shoes, mostly of the black stiletto variety, always with a brilliant red sole. 3) in my headcanon, Ivan and Victoria got hitched soon after the events of RED. 4) actually, Toby Kebbell looks more like a younger Brian Cox than Tom Hardy does. but shush, this is fanfiction, we can pretend.

**Japanese**  
>Makasete onegaishimasu = Please leave it to me (formal)<br>Makaseshimasu = I'll leave it to you (formal)

* * *

><p><strong>Зайчик (Bunny)<strong>

Tak has managed to escape Arthur's hotel suite without a drawing of a slingshot on her forehead.

It may be due partly to Eames still being too drained from his jaunt in Limbo, or it may be due to Ariadne understanding that a meet with a contact is serious business.

It may be due to the way Arthur glared at them all.

She glances at herself in the mirror one last time before setting out for the meet. Pantsuit, crisp and pressed. Louboutins, clean and shined. Hair, pulled into a neat French twist. Good as it'll get on short notice.

In the taxi, she thinks over the new secret she found today. The photograph from Eames' wallet is proof positive in Tak's mind—her uncle's assassin friend, Victoria, is Eames' mother. She doesn't know yet what she's going to do with this tidbit. She's sure Eames hasn't seen his mother in several years (might not even have known she was alive, from his reaction earlier), but he turned down the offer to accompany her…she doesn't know what she's going to do with that, either.

She steps out, pays the meter and a very exact tip.

On the café's patio, Victoria is both obvious and invisible. The man she's with is well-dressed and well-groomed, a slightly portly man with a neat beard and receding salt-and-pepper hair; they sit there making eyes at each other like a retired old married couple.

Tak catches the tale end of a remark as she approaches. "—perfectly serene, as I recall. Like a goddess of war." A Russian accent.

"Oh, _stop_," huffs Victoria, flapping a hand.

Victoria's companion notices Tak first, shrewd eyes taking in her appearance and poise as he stands with a little bow. "I believe you are here to see us?" he says.

Victoria stands from her seat to lean across the table and offer a hand to Tak. "Miyako, it's wonderful to see you again. Goodness, the last time I saw you, you were all of sixteen—what a lovely young lady you've become."

"Wonderful to see you as well, Victoria," Tak says in her best British-educated-Japanese accent, and shakes Victoria's hand.

The older woman gestures as she sits. "My husband, Ivan; Miyako Fujika, Saito's niece."

"An absolute pleasure, my dear," says Ivan, bending to take her hand and place a gentlemanly kiss on her knuckles. "Your uncle is a most worthy rival, and has always been very honest in his business dealings with my lovely wife."

"Do sit down, Miyako," Victoria urges her. "I understand we're here to talk about our Chinese friends and their latest ventures."

Tak takes a seat, knees together and ankles crossed demurely. "They're up to something rather secretive and expensive. My uncle is eager to know what that is, and I thought to myself, 'Victoria must know their security inside and out by now.'"

"That's not very difficult," snorts Victoria. "In fact, it can be summed up in one word: impenetrable."

"If we can't go through, then we go around."

"Mm. Who is it you'd like to meet?"

Tak folds her hands together. "We need ten uninterrupted minutes alone with the head of the project in question: a fellow named Bottin."

Victoria rolls her eyes. "Ugh, Bothersome Bottin. The man's a walking sexual harassment suit, and his assistant is a walking pinup. She handles all the paperwork for their research. Madeline O'Connor. They and a few of their colleagues commute to work by the same train every day, like clockwork. They all take the same train back as well, but dear Dr. Bottin leaves two stops early to take advantage of a very exclusive health club membership at such a time as to have the entire pool—and much of the rest of the place—to himself. If I wanted to be alone with Bottin for ten minutes, I would wait for his after-swim shower."

"Excellent. Now, on the matter of compensation—"

"I'll hear nothing of the sort, dear," Victoria interrupts. "Just do your utmost to keep my son in one relatively unharmed piece."

Tak raises her eyebrows. "So you know about the cat."

Victoria smiles. "Poor slob without a name. I might've known the two of you would get on; you're very much like he was when he was young. Hiding behind masks and oh-so-proud of them all and never once believing in his own mortality." She frowns ruefully. "My fault, I suppose. I wonder if he even knows who he is anymore, under all those masks."

"Perhaps it's better to forget," Tak says. "If you don't mind my asking, how _did_ you know about the cat?"

"Oh, I've known about him professionally for some time. It's quite easy in your particular line of work to end up with a price on your head. I didn't make the connection between the working alias and my son until your uncle mentioned to me that he'd met a man who bore a striking resemblance to Ivan in bygone days."

Tak nods. "He has your photograph in his wallet, you know."

"Sentimental brat," huffs Victoria with a roll of her eyes. "That sort of thing could get him killed someday, and he damn well knows it."

"Or much worse, in our line of work," Tak concedes with a deferent nod.

After a moment, Victoria leans back in her chair. "Stay for some tea, dear."

"Oh, I couldn't impose…"

"Nonsense, you came all this way."

The dance of politeness is done. A waiter is flagged, the order made, the steaming cup delivered.

"Lovely weather, isn't it?" Tak says to Ivan, while this is going on.

"I confess, I find myself growing fond of the climate," Ivan replies. "You have such an impeccable accent. Where did you go to school?"

"Europe. Amsterdam, mostly." The truth, because her uncle may have mentioned it at some point.

"Ah, my cousin's sister loves to vacation there. She says the summer nights are enchanting." A lie. Interesting.

Tak tilts her head. "She's not your cousin's sister."

His eyes twinkle as he smiles at her. "She is not my cousin's sister," he agrees. "She is…I believe in English you use the term 'beard'?"

Tak smirks. "So. How long have you and Victoria been together?"

"Forty years," he says, just as Victoria says, "Two years."

Victoria scowls. "Married. We've been _married_ two years. And we weren't actually together for most of that forty years he's claiming."

"You wound me," says Ivan. "My heart has always belonged to you, zaichik moi."

Tak pretends she doesn't know enough Russian to have just heard an aging gentleman call his aging wife '_bunny_.' When she's their age, she'll probably be all for the 'old people can have romance, too' thing, but right now she's all about the 'old people should never go past the hand-holding stage' thing.

She has to keep pretending all through her cup of tea.

When Ivan starts waxing poetic about Victoria's thighs, Tak gulps down the last of her tea and excuses herself hurriedly. His wicked little grin makes her suspect he knew all along that she actually knows quite a _lot_ of Russian.

"Do remember what I said, Miyako," Victoria calls after her. "Nicholas is my _only_ child."

_Nicholas_. Interesting.

"Makasete onegaishimasu," Tak says with a bow.

"Makaseshimasu," Victoria replies formally.

**.End.**


	34. Catch Him by the Tail

i still only have a vague idea of what leads to this. but this is the "timely arrival of a tiny angry forger with steel-toed boots."

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). OC: Tak Shibuya. taking liberties with how the characters met/how long they've known each other. violence, implied organized crime. contains Japanese (with mouseover subtitles). language: pg-13 (for use of s***, f***, and g**damn).

**pairing:** some Arthur/Eames and some Tak/random guy.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; the night before **Whisperlude** (part of **Papillon**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) Victoria totally knows Saito. because she's awesome like that. 2) i have no idea what "the job in Sacramento" was, aside from the fact that the gang went up against Blue Sun (yes, that's a Firefly reference; all giant evil corporations start somewhere). 3) taping the knuckles is a nice way to cut down on things like tooth-cuts. as an added bonus, most kinds of sport tape are slightly padded and insulating. 4) Tak decided that Eames' bad taste in shirts was directly related to his mood back in **Breakfast at Tiffany's**. 5) in the context of theft, "rolling a body" means checking it for valuables and/or identification. 6) in the context of espionage and organized crime, a "cleaner" (or "clean man") is the guy who gets rid of the dead bodies. 7) some guys think that a girl speaking boyish Japanese is weird, some of us think it's adorable.

* * *

><p><strong>Catch Him by the Tail<strong>

Tak overpays the taxi driver and bolts into the nearby alley at full speed. This is one of those times that she's glad she has a good pair of boots. Waterproof, steel-reinforced, wet-dry grip with a whisper-quiet non-marking tread. Special-ordered to fit like a glove.

So she runs.

She'd been eating butterscotch pudding in front of the week's American Idol rerun when her phone rang.

Unknown Caller.

"Who is it?" she'd chirped with fake cheer.

_~"Don't talk, just listen."~_

Victoria. Tak didn't bother to ask how the older woman had gotten the number—that would be an insult to her skills, her contacts, and the state of her friendship with Tak's uncle.

_~"The job in Sacramento wasn't clean. A pair of Blue Sun enforcers have identified and tracked your cat. You have twenty minutes to be at their intended intercept before they arrive."~_

Tak memorized the address, threw on her boots, tied back her hair, and grabbed a roll of sport tape on her way out the door. She taped her knuckles in the cab.

And now she's running through dark and damp with maybe two minutes left. She crosses a street of stopped traffic, ducking between cars, and runs into the next set of alleys.

At the other end, in the washed-out glow of a streetlamp, she sees one of the bastards. He raises a gun. She launches into the air. Her boot connects with the enforcer's wrist just as the gun goes off.

The sound of a pained cry and a body hitting pavement makes her see red.

Tak breaks the second enforcer's arm as he points his gun at her. She twists back and plants the heel of her boot firmly up the first man's nose. A jerk of her arms shifts her balance (and her remaining target), and she knees the second man in the sternum, punches him in the nose, elbows him in the throat.

All the running has left her winded, but she jogs over to their victim.

"Mister Eames?" she calls as she bends down.

"Cripes," he groans.

A dark stain is spreading across his incredibly ugly shirt (coral and lavender houndstooth, he must've been in an absolutely stellar mood), too dark to be arterial. She probes it gently. It feels like a through-and-through.

"Th' side, wh'the **hell**," Eames slurs in complaint.

"You'd prefer the chest?" she asks.

"Y'ever been shot in th' side? I 'aven't. Bloody **hurts**."

Tak dials her uncle first. It takes two rings, so he must have been in a meeting.

_~"_ Moshi-moshi _."~_

"I need a doctor and a cleanup crew for two."

_~"The address?"~_

She tells him. He hangs up. She calls Arthur.

_~"Yes?"~_

"I regret to inform you that the cat has been waylaid somewhat. My uncle's men are on the way. With any luck, we haven't attracted any attention. If you're at the restaurant, we're halfway to you; Yusuf's on your way, so you might bring him along."

Arthur hangs up.

"Stay awake, Mister Eames," Tak says, lightly slapping at his cheek. "Your mother will not be very kindly disposed toward me if I let you do something silly like go into shock and die after she went to the trouble of warning me."

"My shoulder hurts," he declares.

"Probably because you fell on it. If you can feel that, the gunshot must've gone numb."

"Th' world is very splotchy."

Tak endures another four minutes of semi-coherent whining before a car screeches to a halt and Yusuf jumps out with a syringe in hand. She looks away while he sedates Eames and sees Arthur rolling the bodies.

Careful amounts of cash. No cards, no ID, no receipts or matchbooks or ticket stubs. Just the same little corporate tie-pin bearing the logo of their masters.

Arthur checks both guns, dismantles them, throws some of the pieces into the trash piles in the alley, kicks the rest into the nearest storm drain.

"How did you know?" he asks—no, **demands**.

"Victoria called," she says honestly. "I imagine she's halfway across the country and some friend-of-a-friend caught wind of these two creeps setting out. Maybe a tap or an inside man. Who knows. I ran full-tilt, but he still got the shot off. Probably would've been a liver shot, if I'd been even a second later."

Arthur's lip curls. "Yeah, they don't like the quick kill. Bastards."

Tak realizes that Arthur is wearing khakis and a black pullover (and just the **cutest** half-rim glasses). She clears her throat. "You look very nice."

"Thank you."

Two more minutes, and the cleaner shows up. Some gorgeous Japanese guy with black gloves and bodybags, arms big enough to heft a corpse over his shoulder like a sack of grain. He's got a very nice ass, so she admires the scenery while he works.

Then the doctors arrive (two of them) in a white van that's apparently been converted into an ambulance of sorts. Yusuf helps them get Eames into the back. Arthur opens his car door.

"Need a ride?"

"I'll get a cab a couple streets over."

Van and car disappear into the night. The cleaner whistles as he pours chemicals over the major bloodstains on the sidewalk.

Tak considers him. "_Ato wa hima?"_

He jerks a thumb at his truck. "_Neechan wa yattai?"_

She suppresses a wince. "_Ee. _Yattanda."__

He grins and tosses the empty bottle in the back with the bodies. "_Sugee. _Kakko ii."__

Pleasantly surprised, she effects a modest shrug. "_Jaa, hima nara nomi ni ikouze."_

"_Otoko mitee hanasu," he chuckles. "_Kawaii. _Ikou."___

Well, she may have missed American Idol (again), but the night's not a total loss.

**.End.**


	35. Don't Panic

a silly little snippet of Arthur in Limbo. completely context-free, except for being set after Eames was stuck in Limbo during the demilitarization experiment.

**warnings:** post-movie (slightly AU?). taking liberties with how the characters met/how long they've known each other. OCs: Shelley (Arthur's sister), Isaac (Arthur's ten-ish nephew), Tak Shibuya (Saito's niece). minor blink-and-you'll-miss-it crossover. slight crack. language: pg-13 (for s***).

**pairing:** Arthur/Eames, background Dom/Mal.

**timeline:** several months post-movie; some as-yet-undetermined time after **Darling**.

**disclaimer:** Chris Nolan owns Inception and its characters.

**notes:** 1) title from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 2) it's common, in dreams, to be unable to read things that are written down, and for numbers to appear upside-down or backward. 3) Shelley and Isaac were first mentioned by name in **The Call**. Shelley was named after Mary Shelley (the chick who wrote _Frankenstein_), and she named her son Isaac after Isaac Asimov (the dude who wrote _I, Robot_). 4) the Wonderland watch was first described in **White Rabbit**, where we found out that Tak can't read it. Arthur only wears it with a waistcoat. 5) in case you've been hiding in a hole, or maybe you just managed to forget, Arthur's totem is a weighted red die. 6) this is not Arthur's first time in Limbo (he went in with Dom to get Eames shortly after **Darling** (**Papillon**), you'll see soon), but since he dropped in both times while sharing a dream with people who'd already been, he probably didn't have a need to build anything for himself, and instead found the perfect house that Dom and Mal built (or maybe he was taken there by projections).

* * *

><p><strong>Don't Panic<strong>

Arthur is reading a book that he can't read.

That is, he is looking at the pages, and turning them, and some part of him says 'ah, yes, what you're doing is called reading,' but he can't actually see the words. His eyes chase the letters around the page, but they're nonsense. Something is clearly wrong with the book. So he puts it down.

He's been sitting at the big oak table in Dom's dining room. On the porch (that seems to lead to nowhere), Tak is cutting Shelley's hair. They're chatting in a language Arthur doesn't understand, which is ridiculous, because his sister would've flunked high school French without his help. Behind them, in the distance, he can see skyscrapers and Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower.

"Where are the kids?" he asks, because Dom's house by definition contains Dom's children.

"Mal took them all to the zoo," Tak tells him. "Isaac wouldn't shut up about how 'cool' the alligators were, so James just had to see them."

"Oh," he says.

But Tak's never met Mal. Arthur can't remember why.

"When did you meet Mal?" he asks her.

Tak shrugs. "This morning. Have you seen the cat?"

The Cobbs don't have a cat. He says so.

"Not _their_ cat, _your_ cat."

Arthur doesn't have a cat, either. He's allergic. He frowns and gets up from the table to interrogate Tak further, and a men's pocket watch falls out of his lap.

On the watch's face, Alice sulks while the Mad Hatter orates. The Wonderland watch.

He stares at the watch for a while. Why would he have the Wonderland watch with him? He's wearing jeans and a tee ('Have You Seen My Force Lance?', a gift from Jake forever ago), and his Cartier's right there on his wrist.

"Why would I have…" he starts to say.

He picks it up, opens it. The hands are pointing to nine-oh-seven. He automatically corrects it to one-forty-five without knowing why.

"Tak, what time does this watch say?"

She rolls her eyes and says something to Shelley in that incomprehensible foreign language, puts down the scissors, and comes inside. "It says one-forty-five. Just like my phone." She demonstrates by picking her phone up from the table and showing it to him.

But that's wrong. Tak can't read the Wonderland watch.

Arthur drops the watch and closes his eyes and tries to remember how he got here. "I got here by…I took a cab from…from…_shit_."

Pocket.

His totem is where it should be. He centers his thumb on the one and feels the balance. It's too even. He throws it onto the table, but Shelley snatches it up before it stops tumbling.

"Arthur, you're being really weird. Have you been working too hard or something?"

"You're not my sister," he realizes.

Tak and Shelley share a look. "Who else would she be?" Tak asks. "I mean, she looks like your sister, doesn't she? And she sounds like your sister."

"You've never met my sister, and Mal's dead, and you can't read my watch. I'm dreaming. I don't dream anymore, but I'm dreaming." He runs his hands through his hair. "Shit. _Shit_, I'm in Limbo."

"That doesn't make any sense, Art," Shelley sighs, taking him by the shoulders and pushing him gently onto the window seat. "Just take a deep breath and calm down, and don't do anything drast—"

Arthur jumps when the side of her face explodes in a spray of red.

"Hey!" Tak says, just before taking a shot between the eyes.

"Sorry I'm late, took me ages to find the place," Eames says breathlessly, offering the hand that's not holding a gun. "Lucky for me, your version of Tak is quite far afield of the real thing."

"What happened?" Arthur demands. "How the hell did I end up in Limbo? Is this _your_ fault?"

"You wound me, love. It was very nearly entirely not my fault. In any case, I can just make it up to you later. Now come along, darling, we have a kick to make."

**.End.**


End file.
